Couple of months ago, just about a month before #cpgweds - the engagement my Envy 14 laptop started showing signs of dying - weird noises coming from the vents, system freezing arbitrarily, system getting incredibly hot - and that’s really unusual because the Envy’s cooling system is probably one of the best that I’ve seen in a laptop. Soon enough, it became clear that a fan was not working - my idle temperatures hit 85 degrees C, and start any game or even xbmc, and the temperatures would hit 95-100 and shutdown sooner or later.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This picture{#aptureLink_ZLuYVKGOuU} speaks for itself. Yes, its fugly. What the heck are those 3 bloody orbs ?

Ext2Read is a Free & Open Source Software which allows you to browse your Linux partitions in a very Windows Explorer-esque interface. Unlike other tools{#aptureLink_bvNHKIheYw} Ext2Read also supports ext4 filesystem, even if extents feature is enabled. Like the name suggests – Ext2Read can only read, not write to the partitions – so in case you are paranoid about the tool causing data corruption to your Linux partitions, you can drop those fears.

It seems Oracle is hellbent on destroying whatever good Sun had done to the Open Source Ecosystem. The latest product to get the axe seems to be none other than the Flagship Virtualization program xVM VirtualBox. [….] All tests show that VirtualBox 3.2 lacks any semblance of stability, crashing any operating system running on it randomly. VirtualBox 3.1.8, using the binary-only release for Linux, works like a charm. It is also apparent that VirtualBox 3.

Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we’ll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP.

A lot of our developers are using Linux, obviously they want to listen to music while they’re coding away and looking at the feedback we get it appears that they’re not the only ones. So today we’re pretty happy to present a preview version of Spotify for Linux. Built by our brilliant developers during hack days and late nights, it shares most of the same features as our Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications.

From Adobe Flash Team Player blog: I’m thrilled to announce that Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. You can get it now. Some nice features: With Flash Player 10.1, we added new functionality that detects when memory is running low. Now, content that runs in Flash Player will automatically shut down when the available memory is running low. Flash Player can now automatically reduce the power consumption for content running in the background on a non-visible browser tab to improve performance when users are multitasking.

I’ve owned couple of mobile phones now, all in increasing number of features. But the one thing that remained common amongst all of them, was the ability to use a tethered Internet connection in both Windows and Linux. Until I got the iPhone, that is. With the iPhone, I could no longer use the iPhone as a modem in Linux. Not anymore. I was recently researching about claims that Ubuntu could sync with the iPhone, even the non-jailbroken ones.

I’ve owned a Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970 for nearly 2 years now{#aptureLink_GW9kUit5Kx}, and I use it pretty often with my previous phone ( the Sony Ericsson P1i{#aptureLink_Szc3RZREO3} ), and my current iPhone 3G. I also use it occasionally on my laptop. It has worked fine in Windows XP, Vista & Windows 7. Getting it to work with Linux, however has been an EPIC FAIL. The last time I tried it was probably a year ago, and I just gave up in frustration and continued to use my EP-630 as the earphone.

Been a while since I posted ;) For some strange reason, recently I got an urge to try out ArchLinux{#aptureLink_BWSwiwROlt}. After much deliberation finally decided to try out ArchLinux again, in VirtualBox{#aptureLink_YQu9cIpVYm}. My little install guide I compiled as I was reading through the Official ArchLinux Install Guide{#aptureLink_OrVThoOrTI} + Beginner’s Guide{#aptureLink_AMQvvRytbx}.

Please note: This is highly customized according to *my* requirements and nowhere as thorough /generalized as the official guides. Still, it might help you. Here we go -