Monthly Archives: October 2007

Dell Axim x51v WM6 (Football Edition)

I have been fighting with ActiveSync (on my home XP box) and SyncCenter (on my work vista box) for the last couple of week. Couldn’t sync my Dell x51v PDA with any of them. Was driving me nuts. Tried all kinds of … crap.

So I decided to try a home brewed Windows Mobile 6 rom. And it works! No wifi problems. I tried to do a back up and restore, but that soon got to messy, and I’ve decided re-install everything from the top. Only thing is that, most of my programs where registered so long ago, that it may be hard to find a version to download. On the other hand, maybe it’s time to upgrade to a new (WM6 compatible) version.

Anyway. I’ll try to report back when I’ve tried it a few more days. And a big thank you to “football” and the people at xda-developers. And a big F… you to Dell for not providing this.

Continue reading →

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

I’ve been trying out the last few Ubuntu releases. Ubuntu 7.10 looks even better and the installation was really easy.

Observations:

I’ve some kind of keyboard issue. Sometimes it seems lazy (1-2 seconds delay), other times it gave me 3-5 repeats of the typed character (old logitech PS/2 keyboard).
It couldn’t find my second monitor. Detection of the primary monitor, a Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP-HC, (including resolution and refresh rate) worked great. The new live resolution changes stuff, is great. Welcome to windows 2000! 😉
Detection of any but the basic buttons on the mouse where, still, not detected (like “back”). Amazing. This is such basic functionality…
My main applications is Adobe Lightroom. It’s a windows application, and Wine has had some bad issue with it. With this release it has gotten a lot better. It’s actually possible to start Lightroom, it just can’t load an existing image database (needs to be on a local drive, and I think it sees the wine mapped drives a network drives), and can’t display images when they have been imported. And it take a year to start – you can actually see it draw the GUI elements, it’s so slow.
Disc partition tool takes 3-4 minutes to detect the two hard drives in my machine. Actually crashed once.
Compiz Fusion looks nice, but seems rather useless, and all the window flip-flopping becomes tiring really fast.
Hardware on my desk that’s useless under linux: Creative Web-Cam, Huey Pro screen calibration, Dell x51v PDA.
NTFS R/W support works great!
Looks good. Starting stuff like firefox etc. was fast.
I had to open a shell terminal once – when I edited the grub boot managers menu, to changed the default item to windows. Didn’t edit xorg.conf once.
Migration of windows users is a really cool idea. Could be taken further… (option; “share setting with windows”, or “copy from windows”. Use these setting in Wine for drive mappings, and for firefox/thunderbird settings including add-ons).

All in all, it looks good. I’m sure the minor issues could be solved. To bad about the “deal breaker” with Lightroom.

The Baloo Software Developement Method

2 Replies

I’ve been thinking about the, much ignored and rather unglamorous, state software ends in, when it’s about to be replaced by a newly developed version. It may be an old maintained branch, or it may have been or be about to be replaced, with a new version that’s based on a new code base.

While thinking about this I heard the song The Bare Necessities from Disneys The Jungle Book. Here Baloo sings:

Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
That’s why a bear can rest at ease
With just the bare necessities of life

The Bare Necessities, by Phil Harris, Bruce Reitherman

I decided to name the method used for this kind of development after Baloo.
Continue reading →