Linux

Preware

Preware Screen shotSo I had a Blackberry. I came to hate the Blackberry and dearly wanted to upgrade. Unfortunantly a new Android phone like the Evo was not in the budget.

 

So where did that leave me? Well I went looking over Ebay and Craigslist and did some wheeling and dealing to get a phone with a Linux OS that’s extremely hackable.

 

And I came across the Palm Pre. Sure it’s currently a platform that floundering In the wake of Apple, Google and others but it met the price and freedom requirements I was looking for at the time. I was already familiar with webOS from my wifes Palm Pixi and gave the Pre a shot.

 

I will make no excuses that Palm has been floundering and this can be seen in it’s app store selection. This is where the modding community has helped to make the Pre something still worth having. If you or a friend have a webOS phone but don’t have Preware installed then you are missing out. Over 50% of my applications come from the homebrew community that Preware gives me easy access to.

 

Preware is a package management application for the Palm Pre much like a package manager on Ubuntu or other Linux operating systems. Users can install any package from any of the open standard package feeds on preware.org or add a repository of their own. While a user can install all these packages manually Preware makes managing them and keeping them updated much easier. If you want to install Preware their basic install guide can be found here.

 

So while I didn’t end up with the exact phone I wanted… Preware has helped me to have a highly customized Linux Phone with a custom kernel that’s over clocked while I was at it.

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VLMC (Movie Creator)

VLMC logoThe people that brought us VLC, the simple Swiss Army Knife of video players annonced a few days ago that they are working on VLMC (VideoLAN Movie Creator). Their goal is for it to be a free video editor for semi-professional videos that has a simple interface. Oh and it will be multi platform for you Mac, Linux and Windows fans. SO far the videos and screenshots are very promising for their pre-alpha work.

 

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New Linux Desktop

I just built a new desktop over last month to this one and here is what I have.
MSI P45NE02 Motherboard
Core 2 Quad Q8400 2.66 GHz Processor
4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 800 Mhz RAM
MSI GeForce 210 512MB GPU
350 PSU
Ubuntu 9.10 64bit

Mobo & CPU: $150
RAM: $70
GPU: $25 After Rebate
PSU: Reused one I got for $25 two years ago
Case: Reused an old PII case I like.
HD: Reused 80GB Maxtor PATA drive I got for $40 a while back
DVD-RW Drive : Reused PATA drive I got 4 years ago.

Next month I will purchase a SATA HD for $50 or less.

But the total that came out of pocket for this build is: $245
I like to see what I can build on the low end when I build machines.

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Amazon Number Two in Sales but Number One in Service

I recently read an article that Amazon has increased in It’s MP3 music sales to now make it the number online music retailer. It now stands in a place to be an actual challenger to the online music sales giant iTunes.

After recently having to deal with iTunes after my wife recieved a gift card, I thought that I would make a purchase from Amazon MP3 to compare the two.

My experience with iTunes left me less than happy as I had to use someone’s Windows computer to complete the purchase. In addition I was stuck getting the media in a lower quality AAC format. Sure I was able burn it to CD and rip it to my home computers hard drive but is that really necessary?

Shoot I’ve received better quality free garage band music from dowload.com music.


My experience with Amazon was a bit different. I searched and found some songs that I wanted to purchase. After selecting to purchase them I was initially bothered by the fact that I needed to install a download program to receive them. I thought, “great now another program that I’m going to need to try to install using Wine.” I was pleasantly surprised that Amazon supports Windows, Mac and four Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSuse).  It was a quick and easy .deb install and I was ready to rock-and-roll. The client seemed to work in a similar manner as a bit torrent client and the music was easily downloaded and purchased. Best of all it was in a high quality MP3 format. I would have preferred .ogg but MP3 will do in a pinch.

In the future I think I will do all my music purchases through Amazon. It was quicker, easier and they provided me with the product and services that I wanted.

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