Blang!

” Google Inc. is set to offer its free Android mobile-phone operating system for computers, opening a new front in its rivalry with Microsoft Corp. by challenging the dominance of the company’s Windows software. Acer Inc., the world’s second-largest laptop maker, will release a low-cost notebook powered by Android next quarter” [full story]
carrier to noise ratio

Android was a slow starter but is continuing to make waves… Inching closer and closer to that dream system.

In all of the SUSE varients (and in may other distros as well), the command ls has been aliased so that it actually does a ‘ls -la’. I find this particularly anoying so I have removed this configuration and documented it here: Stopping ‘ls’ from doing ‘ls -la’ instead.

Hot on the heels of my posting on the future of mobile devices comes a story on Venture Beat describing how they got the Google operating system Andriod running on an ASUS netbook.

Android’s Linux core seems to be giving it an early advantage due to Linux’s easy portability and vast hardware support. The article doesn’t mention it but some netbooks have support for 3G sim cards which just makes compelte sense.

I want to point out that a 3G enabled netbook running Android is still not the dream device I’m looking for but it’s getting close. The essential component of the dream device is the hardware. It must be cell phone sized but when docked, become a fully functional workstation (keyboard, mouse, full sized monitor etc.)

Netbooks aren’t the hardware solution. he netbooks are really just crappy laptops. Too big to carry around and with few of the “mobile” featuers that a smart phone would have.

They key aspect of the article is the discussion about how many manufacturers see Andriod as a replacement operating system to Microsoft based systems.

A group of researchers has posted a guide to turning a bunch of Sony PS3s into a supercomputing cluster. The researchers chose the PS3 it is a relatively inexpensive device with a powerful cell processor that “packs a punch.”

Other than the publicity it’s getting, there isn’t much thats new here. The PS3 has a been able to run “guest” operating systems such as Linux since it was released. Sony has even had some of its own employees working on improving it. And using Linux as an inexpensive clustering environment is certainly not new but it is still really cool to see something like this put together.

I’ve finally figure out how to fix the display resolution on the PS3 running Linux. I’ve added it to my PS3 Linux page which is here.

I wrote a “installing OpenSUSE 11.0 on the PS3″ tips page. Check it out here.

I’ve been using OpenSUSE 10.X since it was released and it has been by far my favorite distribution. However, the one big strike against it has always been the sluggishness of its software management. Every time you do _anything_ related to software management Suse goes off on a wild tangent reading files, parsing, downloading and on and on.

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