Remember to “fall back” to standard time this evening. Daylight savings time ended almost two hours ago.
-Jeff
Archive for October, 2004
Happy Halloween, all!
Sunday, October 31st, 2004SUSE 9.2 Live DVD
Saturday, October 30th, 2004I downloaded and burned the SUSE 9.2 Live DVD yesterday and ran it on my laptop. For a live distro, it ran fairly well. I was disappointed by the older versions of programs - like gaim 0.82.1 and Firefox 0.10. Everything ran fairly smoothly after some configuration. My wireless card was not functional, and Microsoft TrueType fonts were not included. The only e-mail client that was included in KDE was kmail, and I’m not a big fan. It did detect my USB Samsung ML-1710 printer and my Mobile Radeon video card without any intervention. Using my Viewsonic VG800b external LCD, I was able to run at 1280×1024 with no problems. In fact, you might call the picture pretty, as SUSE is known to be.
For anyone looking to have access to Linux without making the commitment of a hard drive partition, I recommend checking this out. I didn’t spend a lot of time playing with it, mostly because it didn’t detect my wireless card, but I would imagine there is a lot of good stuff that I didn’t see. If anyone has a copy of SUSE 9.2 Professional they want to lend me to review, I’d definately be appreciative. 
-Jeff
SUSE 9.2 Professional Released
Friday, October 29th, 2004SUSE 9.2 Professional has been released today! I will post a review of my own as soon as I get a copy of it, but for now, GeektimeLinux has a pre-release review posted that you can grab a look at. They’ve also released a Live version on DVD, which I’m about to go download now.
-Jeff
Triton PCS Announces Agreement to Acquire Urban Comm
Thursday, October 28th, 2004BERWYN, Pa., Oct. 28 — Triton PCS Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: TPC) announced today that it has finalized the terms of a proposed stock purchase agreement to acquire Urban Comm - North Carolina, Inc. (”Urban”), subject to government approvals and an order by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court granting authorization to enter into this agreement. Under this proposed agreement, Triton PCS will acquire the outstanding stock of Urban, whose assets include FCC wireless licenses in 20 Basic Trading Areas (”BTAs”) for $113.0 million in cash.
SunCom is positioning itself even more through this deal to be an attractive takeover target for T-Mobile USA. I really hope T-Mobile does it soon, because T-Mobile needs the spectrum in the Carolinas to be competitive with the new Cingular.
-Jeff
New Look
Wednesday, October 27th, 2004I’ve decided to go for a new look. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m definately liking it so far. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment.
-Jeff
FCC Approves Cingular’s AT&T Wireless Bid
Tuesday, October 26th, 2004The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday it has conditionally approved Cingular Wireless’ $41 billion acquisition of AT&T Wireless Services Inc., clearing the last big hurdle for the deal.
The FCC said it voted to clear the deal on the condition, among others, that the companies sell AT&T Wireless operating units and associated airwaves in 16 markets. It also required them to sell 10 megahertz of airwaves in Dallas and Detroit.
The announcement follows clearance by U.S. antitrust authorities on Monday, who required the companies to sell assets in 13 markets in 11 states. Cingular is a joint venture of BellSouth Corp. and SBC Communications Inc.
A bad day for the consumer. However, I don’t think AT&T Wireless had the management to go it alone. It will be interesting to see how the merged entity ends up performing.
-Jeff
Microsoft’s Worst Nightmare
Friday, October 22nd, 2004Firefox, a free open-source browser that loads twice as fast as Internet Explorer, has already been downloaded 2.7 million times, and it has siphoned off nearly 2 percent of Microsoft’s browser market share, now at 93.7 percent. Along the way, Firefox is fast becoming the browser of choice for anyone fed up with all the nasty things polluting the Web (pop-ups and viruses and spyware, oh my!). Google (GOOG) is rumored to be building its own browser based on the Firefox framework, and entrepreneurs are churning out hundreds of microprograms for it (see “The Spawn of Firefox,” below). A minister in Kentucky is even exhorting his flock to switch to Firefox because it blocks those pesky Viagra ads.
This is an article that was in this month’s issue of Business 2.0 magazine. If you haven’t already, please download Firefox. You’ll be glad you did.
-Jeff
Installing apt in SUSE 9.1 Professional
Thursday, October 21st, 2004Installing apt in SUSE 9.1 Professional is definately something I’d been thinking about doing since installing SUSE on my desktop. However, I hadn’t found an easy way to do it - conflicting RPM’s, versions, etc. This guide by Guru is a great one; works like a charm.
-Jeff
gaim 1.0.2 released
Wednesday, October 20th, 2004Well, gaim 1.0.2 has been released!
Here’s the changelog:
version 1.0.2 (10/19/2004):
Bug Fixes:
* MSN file transfers work on big endian machines (Jean-Francois Roy and Evan Schoenberg)
* Fixed the MSN signon crash with Miranda users in the buddy list
* Fixed sending messages to MSN Web Messenger users (Damien Ayers)
* Fixed some memory leaks in the MSN plugin (Evan Schoenberg)
* Fixed a crash viewing certain MSN user profiles (Evan Schoenberg)
* Fixed a crash sending a file on MSN when the file is unreadable
* Fixed a crash deleting accounts (Andrew Hart)
* Fixed a crash inviting to chats (Andrew Hart)
* Fixed a bug in Yahoo privacy handling (Peter Lawler)
* Fixed a crash trying to join a chat from the docklet when not signed in to a chat-capable account (Daniel Atallah)
Looks like it was mostly a security update. You heard it here first!
-Jeff
Business 2.0 Magazine Blog
Tuesday, October 19th, 2004In checking out the Business 2.0 magazine’s webpage, I noticed they have their own blog. They have some interesting stuff contained within. If you like to stay current on business issues, I recommend taking a look, or even subscribing to their RSS feed.
Enjoy,
Jeff