Like many other smart phones, the Samsung Galaxy S9000 has the annoying habit of playing a very loud sound on startup -- and another one on shutdown. It's hard to imagine anyone actually preferring this behaviour to what would be the most sensible: Quietness during either process.

To make the phone shut up, you can do this (provided you have rooted the phone already; note that we've go no tab-completion on the phone, so better cd to the respective directory before moving the files):

1. ssh to the phone
2. Remount the system partition as read-write:
   

   # mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/stl9 /system
   

3. Move the startup sound away:
   

   # cd /system/etc
   # mv PowerOn.wav PowerOn.wav.orig
   

4. Move the shutdown sound away:
   

   # cd ../media/audio/ui
   # mv shutdown.ogg shutdown.ogg.orig
   

5. Reboot.

You should not hear the sounds anymore.

If you want to get your iPod running with SUSE 10, you probably expect everything to work just out of the box without further tweaking; after all, SUSE is a mature distribution and the iPod has both been on the market and supported on Linux systems for a while now. Unfortunately, this is not at all the case: SUSE Linux's media player has only limited and buggy support for the iPod, data transfer rates are extremely slow and the "Do not disconnect!" warning on the iPod's display just doesn't want to go away. In the following, we will find ways to overcome these annoyances.

Packaging and included accessories

The Nokia 9500 Communicator comes packaged in an unimpressive box. Inside this box, one finds a manual, the battery, a charger, a docking station, a CD-ROM, a headset (wired, one earplug) and the phone itself. First impression: What a brick is this!

First impressions: The outside

If you have read my essay on running SUSE Linux 9.2 on an IBM Thinkpad T41p, you know that the Thinkpad's special function keys (like Fn+F3 for "backlight off" or Fn+F12 for "suspend to disk") don't work by default after installing SUSE Linux 9.2.

They can be made to work, however, this requires quite some effort. Let me describe the process here for you.

Building your own kernel

When Steve Jobs announced the Mac Mini at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco on January, 11th 2005, it caused quite a stir.

I have been a happy Apple iBook user (a 12" iBook with a 600 MHz G3 CPU) for the past three years, but new requirements in my job arose and I needed a new notebook, specifically one that could run Linux well, had a decent CPU and three mouse buttons. I got a used IBM Thinkpad T41p, a notebook with a reputation to work fine under Linux. The Thinkpad T41p I got had been running Windows XP and SUSE Linux 9.0 before (a LOT more Windows than SUSE Linux, though, as I have been told).