A common issue I find with Linux is sound. The latest bump is when I installed openSUSE 11.1 on my HP M9351 Desktop, to be fair, it’s not a show stopper but infinitely annoying. Basically, I cannot play sound only through the headphones, and instead it continues playing via speakers plus headphones and there is no ability (even via kmix) to only play through headphones. I guess this must be related to jack sensing for the audio chipset I have ALC888S from Realtek. I think I’ve tried everything even updating ALSA to latest unstable and using the drivers from Realtek website, it probably doesn’t help that I’m not familiar in general with ALSA so cannot even be sure I’m doing the right thing, at least though I am getting sound

Powered by ScribeFire.

I have two phones in mind for my future, and both are good, these are the main deciders for me

Nokia N97

+ QWERTY keyboard & touch screen

+ Nokia has proven track record at providing useful firmware updates

+ 32 GB internal memory

+ OVI App Store, Nokia online marketplace

+ Reliable S60 5th Edition compatibility

- 5 MP Camera, – I know MP don’t matter too much, but my N82 has a better camera

-  Unimpressive processor, ARM11 434 MHz single, no Graphics acceleration, only a bit better than the Nokia 5800 ( how smooth and quick will it be?)

Samsung i8910

+ 3.7″ AMOLED Capacitive touch screen vs 3.5″ Resistive for N97

+ 8 MP camera, capable of recording HD quality video

+ ARM Cortex-A8 processor, dual, with graphics acceleration running @ 600 MHz

- S60 5th Edition compatibility issues, some apps may require resigning or firmware hackery

- AMR audio codec used when recording HD (not as DLNA compatible as made out, may be fixed in future firmware update see HERE )

I think I will have to wait, i8910 is already out on Orange, N97 should be out end of this month, my contract expires in July, by that time hopefully a clear winner will make itself known, and hopefully O2 will be carrying it

EDIT 12/06/2009

See Video Comparison from N97 and i8910 at My Nokia Blog

Powered by ScribeFire.

Although in this case all that was required was the transference of files from the ntfs partition to external drive I just wanted to see what it was like, the download iso was only 246 MiB and I had Vista and ImgBurn to burn it onto CD on my laptop.

When you boot from the CD you are offered with a console prompt where you can choose several boot options, I just accepted the default and pressed Enter and chose the uk keymap, it then boots into a terminal environment where all the tools you require can be used, but I thought it would be easier to use the graphical environment which was just an extra command.

Although the graphical environment was nice, I couldn’t find a file manager so again resorted to terminal for browsing directories, and had to manually mount the ntfs partition and usb drive. I was dismayed to discover that there was no auto-detecting of file systems with option to mount easily available but I guess if you have a damaged partition table you don’t want to try that anyway. Managed to successfully transfer files across and that was that,I shutdown but it didn’t eject the disc before powering off which was annoying.

Overall, I guess I didn’t fully need to use the functionality of the disc. Any recent enough live CD should be sufficient for transferring files across ntfs and external usb drive. Definitely wouldn’t recommend it to someone not familiar with Linux

I’ve played around with it for a few minutes and it looks quite nifty when you click on a video it rotates to fill landscape mode, gimmick I know but it looks good.

If you want it, head over to YouTube Mobile site and click the download link.

Some screenshots are available here with some more detailed description of the functionality

Happy watching