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I thought I would drop in to share what I have been doing with my HP dv8000 laptop. It has been about a week in the making. The initial goal was to have Fedora Core 6 running, set up like my home desktop, in a dual boot with Windows Vista Enterprise to give me a truly versatile mobile machine for whatever I need.

The laptop has two 100GB SATA hard drives installed so the goal was Vista on the primary, Linux on the secondary. I started with an install of Fedora Core 6, but unfortunately, installing GRUB isn’t done automatically for the primary drive if you install it on the secondary. I later found that you can possibly go into advanced options, but after screwing with it awhile, I decided to give Ubuntu a try.

My first install of Ubuntu was great, all of the hardware worked out of the box. I started setting things up and ran into a brick wall setting up Beryl on Ubuntu. Ubuntu automatically installs GRUB on the primary boot drive, so my thought was, ok…now I can just reinstall Fedora and set up GRUB and be good to go. This fortunately was half true. I finished installing, got an odd GRUB error on boot and had to do some playing.

The fix was actually quite easy, boot with the Fedora Rescue Disk, use grub-install to install grub manually and create a working menu.lst file, add Vista to the file, reboot and blammo, I was good to go. For those of you toiling with this currently, the correct line for Vista in grub is:

title                 Windows Vista
root                 (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader     +1

For the uninitiated, this file is located in /boot/grub/. Once you have added this under the Linux record, you can change the default boot # to match the OS you want to load and go by default.

This is where the nightmare set in. I wasn’t aware right away that Fedora had completely failed to notice my Intel Wireless Ethernet Adapter. A quick cursory look led me to http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/ which is a site dedicated to Intel Wireless on Linux actually. I followed the directions to the letter, but after days, gave up on it. I couldn’t get the radio turned on. All of it worked, but the networking applet was not recognizing the adapter.

After my friend Arnan at http://www.sothq.net informed me that he could get Beryl up and running on Ubuntu in no time flat, I decided to reinstall and give it a shot. Fortunately he was right. After a great tutorial he pointed me to, it was up right away, I have to give big recognition to a nice tool called Envy. Envy installs ATI and nVidia drivers quick and easy. I will note that running it in X windows caused a X crash on reboot, but I did a CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a terminal, ran Envy from the command prompt, restarted X and all was right in the world. After installing Beryl via the tutorial I did have one glitch, the nVidia drivers had installed in 16 bit color depth in the xorg.conf…I changed it to 24, restarted X and I was set.

The rest of this afternoon I went through the package manager, installed all sorts of apps, configured it to my heart’s content to make it all pretty, and now I have a beautiful, fully functional Linux installation dual booted on my desktop.

I wanted to take a few minutes to discuss the setup I have built for podcasting. I am still in the process of defining my content, getting my into tunes together and setting up the basic format I want to do. I am also listening to a lot of shows at work to try and get a feel for what I want to do. I thought I would take a few minutes to explain the setup I have built and see what kind of thoughts you have on it.

My first idea was to build a solution that is portable, something I can take and run, create my podcasts on the go or on location, and be untethered from PC if need be.

Choosing the hardware wasn’t that difficult, there are a lot of options in a wide range of price points, but when you narrow down your actual needs, you can usually shave off the larger units and find something that will do everything you need at a nice price. I decided to start with a Fostex MR-8HD. The MR-8HD is an 8 track digital multitracker that retails around $399. I chose it for a few reasons:

• Four track simultaneous recording with phantom powered XLR connectors: That means I can record four people at the same time on discreet channels using high quality mics. Usually it also allows me two local speakers, one skype remote, and an audio in from the PC for effects and playback of other sources.
• 40GB Hard drive for enough room to work on large projects and work on different segments at the same time.
• USB to export tracks to PC for actually building the podcast itself in Audition.

That brings me to the PC side of the house. I am using a standard P4 PC with Adobe Audition, an M-Audio Black Box ASIO capable USB audio card and a nice set of AKG headphones. I can get the raw WAV files off of the MR-8HD and load them in Audition and work with files as well as plug in a nice XLR mic to do overdubs and additional content.

For microphones, I chose the Audio-Technica PRO 8HEx. I chose it because headworn, I remove stand bumping noises as well as keeping my hands free to work and tweak at will. It’s a high quality dynamic mic with an XLR connector. It comes with several types of pop screens and retails around $50.

I also add in a small Behringer mixer to route a few PCs, television and such into my recorder so I can deal with several sources at the same time and monitor them all through the same KRK Rokit RP-5 monitor system I have connected directly to the MR-8HD.

If you round the system out with an M-Audio Keystation 49 Keyboard to trigger any sound effects and any other sounds I want to mix into the pot.

Overall this gives me a very versatile podcast studio that is also completely usable for making quick and dirty song demos, yea I am a guitarist too

These things have been swirling for months and there is no confirmation from Microsoft so this is strictly speculation. Having said that, it’s possible that Microsoft will release a new Xbox 360 console, codename Zephyr that is black, has a 120GB Hard drive and HDMI support. The current premium system would be come the base model at the $299 price point and the current base system with no hard disk would die entirely.

I have to say I find a grain of truth in this rumor. Being a loyal Xbox 360 gamer, ok maybe not so loyal, I have a Wii and a PS3 also, I am clamoring for HDMI support and a bigger hard drive. I also think that given how I have grown to use the system, a 360 without a Hard Drive is just not really the same console. You lose too much functionality.

I look forward to seeing if this comes to fruition. I’ll be posting my Xbox 360 for sale the day they ship….well maybe not…two 360s would mean Dawngrrl and I wouldn’t have to try to beat each other to play it at night!

Last night I was doing some work in Word 2007 and needed a template. When I went to choose one, I was greeted with the Windows Genuine Advantage verification tool. The dialog box indicated that for Office 2007, the WGA tool checks for authenticity every time you use the online template sites.

Bad news for would be copiers unless you have no use for templates. On a more positive note, the template libraries are amazing. Instead of two or three generic templates per document type, there are dozens and dozens that get into more granular document types.

I was able to find one that unique fit the document I was creating and easily update it to fit my needs.

Office 2007 is what I consider a milestone product. I still am not completely used to the ribbon menu system yet, but even when I need to find something, it’s not very difficult. Things are laid out in a very logical way. Particularly I needed the spell checker and not being a frequent Word jockey did not know they shortcut off hand.

I looked at the top menu, saw “Review” and sure enough, there it was. I did have one tiny snag. I created my document, saved it in the pre-07 Word format, when I went to open it again, it was corrupted. Even the Office 07 repair tool could not save it. Ironically, it opened perfectly in Wordpad and I was able to save it as an RTF file. Office 07 still would not open that file either. I opened it one last time in WordPad, resaved it with a different file name, and Office opened it just fine. Odd to say the least.

If you have any thoughts about Office 07 feel free to comment, just don’t use this as a pulpit to slam the Windows Genuine Advantage system….Microsoft is a business, the point is making money, you can’t expect them not to put measures in to keep the software from being stolen.

While listening to This Week in Tech today I heard a statement that astonished me. Then to make it worse, it was agreed upon by several of the pundits.

To make Vista perform well you need at least 3GB of Ram

I hate to be the voice of reason here, but I am running it incredibly well, Enterprise edition on a HP with 1GB of Ram. I have been using it for nearly 6 months and it’s performed just fine using Office 07, Photoshop, Live Writer, Dreamweaver, FTP apps, even Flight Simulator and World of Warcraft (once I updated video drivers)

The requirements of Vista have been severely exaggerated. Sure a monster system will run it quite well, but the bargain basement Vista systems right now run quite well too. If you can buy a computer under $500 that runs Vista fine, don’t believe you need $500 in Ram just to run it.

If you want to know for sure, go to your local CompUSA or BestBuy and play with one of the Demo systems, more than 3/4 of them will have 1GB of Ram and run just fine….just like mine.