How to use Your Mobile Phone as Remote for your Linux Media Player

Monday, July 13th, 2009

One of the Accessories that comes shipped with my Dell M1330 laptop is a media Remote control which allows the laptop media player to be controlled remotely. Unfortunately Dell in their wisdom left this cool accessory out of the default configuration of the M1330 that ships with Ubuntu pre-installed. Thankfully there is an even better tool available which is much more useful than the XPS media remote, Its is called Remuco

Remuco is a duplex remote control system for Linux media players and mobile devices equipped with Bluetooth or WiFi.

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Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on Dell XPS M1330

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

So Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex turned out to be a bad experience on my dell m1330. Many things that worked out of the box with Hardy heron got broken on Ibex. Things like Finger print reader, bluetooth, Graphic Display, Audio, all had one problem or the other. I was able to walk around most of the issues, although some were just unfix-able (like the screen corruption that i get when i enable compositing metacity or compiz) could not be fixed.

When Jaunty alpha6 was announced with many folks on identica claiming it to be very stable i decided to make the switch. I have since been running Ubuntu jaunty jackalope on my laptop. People say that the grass on the other side is always greener,well that was how running jaunty on my dell m1330 turned out. It wasn’t perfect and although i noticed many improvements from intrepid ibex like faster boot, better notification system, better support for suspense and hibernation, they were also some huge show spoiler like the Intel graphic regression which seem to affect the Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c) graphic chipset the most, causing the system to hard freeze requiring me to have to manually power down the machine. This issue got really bad that i had to downgrade to ubuntu hardy heron (which ran perfectly on my system) while i waited for walk rounds to the problem.
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My Views on UbuntuOne

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

I have always tried to focus my blog posts on Guides and Howtos as they relate to my experiences in free and open source software. Today however i take an Exception and i will like to speak let out on my opinion about the Ubuntu One issue.

First to set some things straight. Am not saying that canonical should not make proprietary software i have never complained about launchpad or Landscape
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