Linux

I just got a Motorola RAZR V3 when I changed my cellphone plan. It is a really nice phone that I can connect to my computer using a USB cable. I decided that I wanted a custom ringtone instead of the default. It’s not a difficult process at all but there is a lot of information scattered around the Intarweb that makes it difficult. Here is my summary process:

1. Find something you want to use as your ringtone. It can be an mp3 or wav file or whatever.
2. Convert to wav file if its not already there, minimal survival command: mplayer -ao pcm filename.mp3. You should now have a audiodump.wav file.
3. Download and use Audacity to cut the audiodump.wav to about 20 seconds (mine is 18)

1. Save the clipped wav file and then encode it to mp3, minimal survival command: lame -b 64 -s 44.1 -mm —tt “Title” cutsound.wav output.mp3

The title says it all folks. This is the first time in my Linux usage history (which begins somewhere in 1995-1996) that I have had a workstation crash due to something out of my control. I will admit that I have caused my workstations to crash a number of times due to my own stupidity or carelessness, no sense in denying that. What is very different in this case is that my workstation crashed this morning due to a kernel bug and what's more this is the worst kind of bug -- one that is known to exist.
Over the course of the last few days I have had several incidents where I had to reboot the computer and do a n extended, manual filesystem check because of the following error:

EXT3-fs error (device dm-0) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted

I had this really great post but my Drupal decided to eat it because FCKEditor died or something. What total crap. Oh well.

I have been really busy lately so I haven't had much time to work on the TrackPoint driver. It seems to have found its way in to the -mm kernel tree which makes my life easier.

I have become obessed with making my SFF PC quiet and reducing the amount of electricity we use in our apartment. The need for quiet comes from a noisy fan. I want to find a place that sells the Vantec 60mm Stealth fan and grommet as well as some noise dampening material. I don't want to have them shipped seperately as I'll pay way too much. I also ordered a kill-a-watt tool that I can use to measure the amount of electricity devices use. I plan on testing my PC at idle, full load and, on ACPI S3 which is Suspend to RAM or STR.

It looks like the USB Suspend/Resume bug has finally been fixed in Linux 2.6.5. I’ll leave my patch available for anyone who can’t upgrade.

I’ve updated the TrackPoint driver for Linux 2.6.5, get it at Stephen @ Clarkson.

 Bryan mentioned that I was behind the times with udev-022. So, I upgraded to udev-023 and everything still works.