Archive for March, 2007

Google Phone?

Friday, March 16th, 2007

Not content with being the worlds most popular search engine, and Steve Balmers current obsession Google are apparently working on a mobile phone now too! Details are very limited so far, but apparently this was finally confirmed by Isabel Aguilera, head of Google Iberia, to Spanish IT site Noticias on Wednesday last. Previously a closely guarded secret within Google, when the existence of a mobile phone project was leaked to the New York Times some time ago, the alleged leakers were given the boot by Google.

What’s interesting is that by virtue of their acquisitions over the past couple of years, Google have a couple of ex-Apple veterans on board now too, namely Mike Reed, a graphics expert, and Andy Rubin, whose experiences at Danger Inc. may be more relevant, given their well-known Sidekick phone product.

While specifics are hard to come by at the moment, and there are no available estimates as to when the phone will eventually be released, I am definitely going to be keeping an eye out for this.

Changing the Desktop in SuSE Linux 10.2

Thursday, March 15th, 2007

Well, I got back from lunch and the first thing I was hit with was a request to change the desktop on a colleague’s laptop from fvwm to Gnome.

Apparently he did a base install of SuSE 10.2 last night and of course Gnome wasn’t installed. When he installed Gnome this morning via Yast, the laptop still booted to fvwm. Not being overly familiar with SuSE 10.2, I hunted around a bit, poking through the X configuration files before I came across a reference to /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager.

Sure enough, when I looked in the above file, the DISPLAYMANAGER variable is set at the top of the file. By default it is blank, but you can set it to xdm (the default), gdm, or kdm – or indeed any other display manager you have installed.

It’s been quite a while…

Thursday, March 15th, 2007

It’s been over 2 years since I updated this ‘blog, but I recently thought I might like to give it a try again. Oh wait… it’s after mid-day…

Lunch time.

See you later.