iPhone 3.1 OS Update to Include BlueTooth Control Support

According to The iPhone Blog the upcoming release of iPhone 3.1 OS includes support for using the next/prev track controls on Blue Tooth head sets.

iPhone OS 3.0 introduced support for stereo BT head sets including partial support for the controls (volume and play/pause), but curiously no support for skipping tracks. 3.1 will remedy that thankfully.

There are other features and improvements in 3.1, for example, you will be able to paste into the phones keypad screen (automatically transposing alpha-numerics phone numbers into digits) and some updates to 3GS specific functionality.

Unfortunately, there isn't any mention yet whether Apple has identified the root causes of 3.0's battery consumption and heat issues.

3.1 beta 2 released this week, expect several more betas before the final product is released.

VMware Releases ESXi with Dell / IBM Customizations

The VMware ESXi download page has two new downloads, ESXi installable with Dell and IBM customizaions:

VMware ESXi 4.0 with Dell Customization
Version 4.0.0 | 164009 - 07/16/09 348 MB ISO Image for ESXi Installable that includes Dell customization.

VMware ESXi 4.0 with IBM Customization
Version 4.0.0 | 164009 - 07/16/09 348 MB ISO Image for ESXi 4.0 Installable that includes IBM customization for use on supported IBM server platforms.

I can't find any information detailing what 'customization' is included in either install. Is it management (OpenManage stand alone), drivers???

I suppose I'll have to install it on one of the m600 servers and find out.

Update: I got a response from a Dell rep on the Power Edge mailing list "Vmware ESXi 4.0 includes Dell OpenManage as well apart from drivers."

Windows 7 Pre-Order Starts Today, Half Off

Microsoft has made it official, click here for details.

There are a good number of retailers selling the pre-order (the standard set, Best Buy, Office Depot...), and online you can get it at Newegg.com, Amazon and Tiger Direct.

Microsoft has this note about the duration of the pre-order sale: "The offer begins on June 26, 2009 and will continue while supplies last, or until July 11, 2009, whichever comes first."

This is probably the best deal you could expect out of Microsoft. So pre-order while you can.

Windows 7 Discount, Limited Time Only!

According to this article at CNN (which appears to originate from CNET), Microsoft is discounting the heck out of Windows 7 Home and Professional upgrades for a period of two weeks.

Starting tomorrow (June 26) thru July 11, you will be able to purchase the upgrade versions on Windows 7 Home and Professional for $40 and $99 respectively.

Those of us who are running the release candidate need to jump on this offer. Unfortunately, I haven't found any word of a discount on Windows 7 Ultimate, so those running the RC may be forced to reinstall to downgrade from Ultimate to Professional.

The upgrades should be available at Best Buy, Amazon and many other retailers. I checked Newegg.com but as of today, all they list is the release candidate.

The article also mentions something about limited quantities. They weren't able to expound on that, so who knows what that means. Limited number of copies per customer, or a limited number for the entire community?

Fedora 11 Released

Fedora 11 Leonidas released yesterday. I've performed an upgrade and a clean install, both on encrypted laptops. Both installs went smoothly, however the upgrade took close to 3 hours. Yikes!

Some thoughts:

• ATI has not released fglrx drivers yet for kernel 2.6.29, on which is what F11 is based
• To get my nVidia based card (Geforce 8400 GS) to boot using the fancy Plymouth animated scene, I had to add "vga=0x361" to the kernel boot params in grub.conf, 32 bit 1280x800
• I also had to add "vmalloc=128MB" to my grub conf so that the nvidia (kmod-nvidia-PAE) would load at runlevel 5. I kept getting errors related to vmalloc without this. Obviously, if you had a 256MB card you'd want to set it appropriately
  

I've just finished the installs / upgrades, so I can't comment yet on the features.

Get Fedora 11 now at fedoraproject.org

Update: The issue that I encountered with my nVidia card in F11 is documented in this Red Hat bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=489078

I also made an FAQ entry documenting this solution on the Common F11 Bugs page.

Windows 7 Release Date Set

Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 will release October 22, 2009.

I've been running Windows 7 RC 64bit on one of my home systems and have been pleased with the speed and stability as compared to Vista.

Fedora 11 Delayed until June 9

Unfortunately, the release of Fedora 11 has been delayed by just over a week due to this bug.

In a nutshell a scenario was uncovered by which anaconda would attempt to remove an extended partition while it still contained logical partitions.

Good find and definitely worth pushing the release back to address.