As I just got my hands on a new bluetooth headset – a Sennheiser MM100 – I wanted to make it work with Debian Squeeze (worked like charm with my Android phone out of the box). My notebook Samsung R780 does not come with bluetooth equipped so I use my old Belkin mini bluetooth adapter F8T016 to connect and I guess it should work with any more or less current bluetooth adapter (of course it has to support A2DP).
Since about 3/4 of a year now I’m the proud owner of an Android powered smartphone: I decided to go with HTC’s Desire which is kind of a rebuilt of Google’s Nexus One (which was also manufactured by HTC). It’s been a while since it’s first appearance so naturally there are already newer phones available succeeding the “original” Desire. And of course there are already plenty of reviews available on the net – but however, those are my two cents! 
I wanted to replace my desktop computer by a laptop for quite a while now and as it started to randomly freeze – no matter which OS it ran – I decided the right time has come now. I did some online research and then picked a Samsung R780 Helix (link in German). The bare technical facts:
The R780 is available in several flavors which differ in harddisk space and CPU type. Helix comes with an Intel Core i5 430M and a 640GB harrdisk. So far I don’t regret my choice! It’s very quiet (no noisy fans), good keyboard and a nice display. Of course it comes preinstalled with Windows 7 (64bit). I didn’t remove Windows but I wanted Linux installed as well. (By the way, the hardware seems pretty compatible with current Linux distrubutions.) So, this is how I got along…
Ubuntu‘s latest release “Lucid Lynx” is out for a while now so I decided that this would be the right choice for my netbook “Asus Eeepc 1000H”. I went for the default i386 desktop release as I don’t like the netbook editions. With the help of “UNetbootin” it’s quite easy to create a bootable USB stick from the downloaded iso file. The installation was a peace of cake and if you previously installed Ubuntu somewhere (and even if you didn’t) it should not be a problem. I recommend keeping a wired network connection during installation (and as it shows, you will need it).
Once installed, fully upgrade your system to the latest packages and this might even pull in a new kernel. Then reboot and try to establish a WLAN connection… At least, I failed. 
There seems to be a an upstream bug in Lucid’s kernel which prevents WPA protected WLAN connections to work properly. The solution seems to be installing the latest Ralink RT2860 WLAN driver. I found this workaround at launchpad published by killerbee – thanks for that! (Have a look at post #25 of the bugreport.) So, I will more or less just sum up his advice here.
Of course I wanted my Wintec WBT-201 gps logging device to work with Fedora as it did with Debian/Ubuntu (see this post). And after playing around a little with the stuff, it did! So, this is what I wanted:
If you’re running Debian testing (aka “Lenny”) which brings no Nvidia driver packages – only the legacy ones – or like to install the latest drivers by Nvidia for Etch, you’ll be running into problems: the Nvdia installer won’t find everything necessary for compiling the kernel module. So, here’s a small HOWTO:
First, download the latest Nvidia driver (by the time of writing it’s version 100.14.11) corresponding to your architecture (i386 or amd64) from the Nvidia ftp site (just look here). Then, make sure the following packages are installed:
I’m back – finally! I got a new computer (no, not for Christmas, bought the parts myself a few weeks ago and assembled it myself) and until now it works great. Hopefully it stays that way…
The main specs are:
Though there are some quirks concerning Linux and ACPI support with the current BIOS of the motherboard I’m pretty content with everything – as there is a workaround this issue. I will write something about that in the near future, but I’m still undecided which Linux distro I should use… At the moment it’s boiling down to Ubuntu 6.10 or Fedora Core 6. Well, let’s see and be sure that I’ll let you know