Author Archives: Linerd

Back Up Your Mobile Phone Contacts with Ubuntu and Bluetooth

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Many of the mobile phone providers offer a service to back up your phone contact list online for a monthly fee. It usually costs somewhere around $5 US per month. Why pay this fee when you can back everything up yourself? All you need is a bluetooth enabled mobile phone, a bluetooth adapter for your computer, and Ubuntu. My phone is a Samsung Alias and I’m using the built-in bluetooth adapter in my MSI Wind netbook. You may need to adjust the procedure slightly for your setup. Continue reading →

Microsoft Leaves the Door Wide Open for Linux on Netbooks

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According to an article on Computerworld, Microsoft plans to offer six different versions of Windows 7. For developed markets, Microsoft will focus marketing efforts on two versions; Windows 7 Home Premium for consumers, and Windows 7 Professional for business customers. The lightest version of the OS will be Windows 7 Starter Edition. It limits users to a maximum of three open applications. This version will be intended for developing markets. Continue reading →

Windows 7 Hosed my Boot Record

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Last weekend I finally decided to give the Windows 7 beta a try. I’ve got three hard drives in my computer. Drive 1 has Windows 2000 and Ubuntu 8.04 on it. The Grub boot loader is on the master boot record to select the OS at boot time. Drive 2 is set up as a storage drive. Drive 3 is set up with a large storage partition along with a 20 GB boot partition that had Fedora 10 on it. I purposely had this set up separately for testing. It requires changing the boot order in the BIOS in order to use it. This seemed like the perfect place to install Windows 7 to try it out. Continue reading →

Force USB Device Discovery in Ubuntu

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I previously did a post on how to Create a Button to Restart USB in Ubuntu. The purpose of that procedure was to get the USB hub in my HP w2207 monitor to recognize a flash drive that had been inserted into one of the ports.

Well I’ve found a better way to force this recognition that doesn’t require root permission. It turns out that issuing the lsusb command polls all of the USB devices and causes my flash drive to be recognized and automounted. You can try this in a terminal with: Continue reading →

Ubuntu on the MSI Wind

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I’ve been using my MSI Wind U100-432US for a few weeks now. If you’re interested in my initial review, you can find it here. Shortly after getting this great small laptop I decided it was time to install Ubuntu. I decided to go for a Hardy install because of its Long Term Support status. I have several computers at home running Ubuntu and I’d rather not go through full distribution upgrades every six months on all of them to keep up with the latest releases. Continue reading →