2007 was the year that I became a father, was ordained and finally got a degree.

Originally emailed to Richard Bacon on Five Live.

This got me invited to speak on-air but I wasn't at my laptop to respond to the request in time.

My ongoing efforts to eliminate wires from my desk (I'll just about accept that I have to have a power lead running into the back of my laptop but I want no more than that) led me to buy a set of Acoustic Energy bluetooth speakers to replace my rather old and ailing set. Much like my adventures with openSUSE 10.3 on a Samsung R60plus, this has good and not-so-good aspects.

Now, I'm not daft and I'd checked the BlueZ wiki on audio devices to ensure that it should be possible. The AE speakers support A2DP and so I figured I'd be in business. I was right. To a point.

First, the good news. I followed the guidelines on the Wiki for setting Banshee. I use Banshee for all my listening needs as Helix Banshee allows me to listen to BBC Radio on the RealAudio streams (as an aside, my life would be a lot easier if the BBC would do the Right Thing^TM and start streaming in MP3 or - even better - Ogg Vorbis like Virgin Radio do). This worked perfectly - I enabled the Audio Service in the GNOME bluetooth applet, edited .asoundrc, started Banshee and hit play. A notification popped up inviting me to bond with the speakers and, once I'd done so, the White Stripes came blasting out of the speakers which I hastily turned down (wow, a lot of power). Success.

Now, the not-so-good news. RealPlayer is not listed as a supported player on the Wiki but I had reckoned without Banshee not playing RealAudio streams through the GStreamer plugin. I suppose it should have occurred to me but it simply hadn't. So, if I'm listening to a radio stream I have to either listen through the internal speaker in my laptop or plug into the speakers' mini-jack input (or hope that the BBC do indeed at some point sort out their streaming and not require people to use a proprietary codec). The other not-so-good news is that my bluetooth mouse interferes with the audio so it gets choppy and slows down if I'm using my mouse.

Still, all that is put into perspective by the fact that, other than actually bonding to the speakers, I couldn't use them at all in Windows.

I bought Amanda a Samsung R60plus laptop for Christmas and, while it's a very nice laptop, it has caused some degree of pain so far. This is by no means a full technical review, just a comment on my experiences with it.

First, the good things. It's based on an Intel Core2 Duo CPU with 1G of RAM, this makes it pretty nippy, the dual core of the CPU makes for a noticeable performance jump over my Core Solo-based laptop. The onboard graphics adaptor is an ATI Radeon and the openSUSE ATI guidelines worked perfectly. These drive a very clear and easy to view 15.4 widescreen LCD at 1280x800. The huge hard drive (120G) has plenty of space for the pre-installed Vista^TM and openSUSE 10.3.

Now, here come the problems. The wired network adaptor couldn't be detected and configured during install meaning that I couldn't add online repositories. I proceeded with the installation and installing from the DVDs went very smoothly and quickly but after the installation, the machine apparently would not boot Linux. A bit of experimenting with kernel command-line options revealed that the ACPI stack was the problem. This became Novell bug #350717 and also served to explain why the network adaptor hadn't worked during installation. The default boot option now has acpi=off while I await responses on that bug. The bug incidentally means no power management and the machine doesn't power-off on shutdown.

The wireless adaptor doesn't work, period. lspci reports it as being based on an Atheros chipset so naturally, I downloaded and installed the MadWiFi openSUSE drivers but no dice. So, I tried ndiswrapper following the openSUSE guidelines for Ndiswrapper on Atheros chipsets. This showed some improvement as I could now see my wireless network in NetworkManager but couldn't connect even with no encryption enabled on the router. Now, I can't help but wonder if this is in someway related to the ACPI issue but I can't be sure - especially the MadWiFi issue. I decided to buy a USB dongle that would work and settled on a Ralink based Edimax dongle after seeing it listed on Linux Emporium's Linux-friendly WiFi page. This uses the rt2x00-kmp-* package which is part of the openSUSE core distribution. Cue another bug: Novell bug #350956 and this also doesn't seem to work. Thankfully, with ACPI disabled, the wired adaptor works with the sky2 module so Amanda can at least get online in my study.

Now, some good news and something weird to finish with. It's a little thing but the R60plus has an SD slot in the front. My Asus A6J has one in the side. Mine doesn't work but the one in the R60plus does exactly what you'd hope. Plug in an SD card and it's detected and mounted. If it appears to be from a digital camera, it's treated as such by gnome-volume-manager. Excellent. The weird thing is that plugging speakers or headphones into the headphone mini-jack doesn't cut the internal speakers. It's not a software issue because it's the same in both OSs.