Friend of mine bought Acer Aspire 5810T with big sticker advertising Linux support on it. After installing Fedora 11 on the laptop the “fun” started. He had constant issues and we talked for some time over the phone… and all that time I thought it was only a new user error.
 
After he brought it to me and after some investigation I saw that the issue is with ethernet card driver. Ethernet card uses atl1c module from companny called Attansic that has been bought by Atheros. For details on the issue you can look at Fedora and Ubuntu bugs.
 
But the moral of the story is that if you want to run Linux don’t buy laptops that have stickers advertising Linux support on them, and don’t buy Acer laptops!
 
UPDATE: This Acer laptop came with Linux pre-installed. My friend called me and asked what should he do after after laptop boots and shows him “root:#” prompt! I told him to type startx but it seams that it came without any GUI or Window Manager! Then I told him to install Fedora 11.
 
Also there is a big sticker on the laptop exclaiming “8h battery life”, but after installing Fedora 11 Gnome battery applet displays only 4h of battery life! Any comments? Maybe they tested battery performance with that pre-installed Linux – they leave it at root prompt and do nothing for 8 hours :)
 
I send mail to atl1c developers at Atheros and props to them – they replied almost instantly and sent the source of correct driver. I tried compiling module on my machine and it works, I’ll try it on friends machine today and report back. So we are making some progress.

After updating VirtualBox from 2.2.4 (OSE) to full VirtualBox 3.0.2 I saw constant BSOD on guest Windows XP machine.
 
After googling for misbehaving intelppm.sys that was causing the BSOD I found this VirtualBox ticket #420 with this issue.
 
It seams that on Centrino hardware during the update of VirtualBox the Guest os now sees different CPU, and after the new CPU is installed intelppm.sys driver causes BSOD.
 
The solution is simple, open regedit go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm
after changing the ‘Start’ value to ‘4′ and rebooting everything works ok.
 
Thanks to Virtual PC Guy for his great blog entry regarding this issue.

 
I have been building Linux media center and one thing that was missing was a great remote control. I was impressed with Fiire Chief remote, but it is too expensive and the Fiire company stopped making it ;(
 
Then I found out that you can use Wiimote on Linux and that it costs 40$ on Ebay.
 
This guide isn’t intended only for those with Media Centers, because you can use Wiimote as a remote for any desktop application, presentations or even games.
 
There are some basic hardware requirement likes usb bluetooth dongle or bluetooth already built in your laptop and Nintendo Wiimote.
 
This guide is more focused on Fedora but you can use it with OpenSuse, Arch and Ubuntu. The main difference is how to install tools, other things should be same. There is also an Ubuntu guide that you can use as parallel with this guide.
 
Read rest of story…

 
Netbook running on ION platforms uses only 5W od power and gives you great 3D perfromance and Full HD Video playback. Yes, I know, it sounds fabulous ;)
 
I can’t wait Linux netbooks on ION platform, I also hope NVidia stops with the nonsense that all others accepted and gives us netbooks with more that 2GB of ram!

 
This weekend Drazen[1] and I held a OpenStreetMap talk on Slobodni Festival 2009[2]. After talk we asked people to join us for a Mapping Party. You will soon see much more streets in Čakovec and on all major roads going in and out of Čakovec.
 
[1] Dražen OSM profile
[2] http://2009.slobodnifestival.info/