Ok, quick rant because this has been pissing me off. Seriously, what is so difficult about releasing a decent version of Adobe Flash for Linux? Granted, it has come a long way and the fact that it works at all is at least something I guess, but come on. Fedora is coming out with it's tenth release in a few weeks, Ubuntu is on their ninth, yet it seems like Flash is perpetually half assed. At this point, the web is literally saturated with everything from Flash ads, to video and audio players, to games, yet I always find myself having to accept a buggy user experience as status quo. I will give some praise to Adobe for actually releasing RPM's and DEB's, which is more than most companies offer, but there is no way they have more than three guys working on their Linux ports.

For example, with Flash 9 I had fairly solid playback when it worked, yet it was hit or miss whether it would actually load with the page. Often I had to reload the firefox tab three times before it would start, instead of just displaying a grey box.

For the unfortunate person who is a gadget freak and likes to stay current with the latest technology, running the Creative X-Fi turned out to be a real pain in the arse under Linux. For a very long time there was absolutely no support from any of the open source drivers, and Creative announced that they would maybe at some point release open sauce drivers of their own if we were good children. Thankfully, they did. BUT, as expected, they were buggy as hell, confusing, and only for x86_64! Well, I guess free is free.

Regardless, getting the drivers to work under Linux was still a right royal pain, until earlier this year when Open Sound System released a slew of diffrerent distribution packages claiming they had an easily installable and workable driver set for the X-Fi. I was skeptical at first, but after installing a very painless RPM for Fedora 9 off of their website, the sound worked great! No problems whatsoever and Songbird seems to play very well with it.

Unfortunately, a few months have gone by now and I just today decided to do a full upgrade to the latest Fedora 9 updates which broke the OSS package. :(

Whenever a new kernel is installed, the package detects the change and rebuilds the drivers against the updated kernel. This has worked fine for the past couple of updates, but the latest bump to 2.6.26.3-29.fc9.x86_64 was a bit much and the compile failed.

They're here! I've been getting lots of requests from eager birdies wanting to try out Songbird 0.7.0 RPMs on Fedora, and the wait is finally over. I'm sorry it took a bit, I had a wedding to go to over the weekend which took up most of my time and the rpm builds turned out to be a bit more complicated than a simple version bump. As always, the rpms are built on the official Fedora 9 build servers, although you might find that they work ok on Fedora 8 as well. I'm once again providing i386, x86_64, ppc, and ppc64 packages. Thank you for all the kind words from those of you that got some good use out of the 0.6 rpms, I'm glad to be of service. You might be interested to know that so far over 500 Songbird 0.6/0.6.1 rpms have been downloaded from countries all around the world. Thanks again!

When installing these I recommend that you remove your Songbird profile (~/.songbird2) first to avoid upgrading issues. This isn't a problem with the rpms specifically, but there have been some upgrade bugs reported to the developers when going from 0.6 to 0.7. To be safe it is usually good to start clean. As always, feel free contact me if you have any issues or questions.

Continuing with my recent summer cleaning event, I also have an AMD Athlon X2 5000+ CPU and Heatsink for sale. The heatsink has never been used and the cpu was recently pulled from a computer I built not long ago. It was time for an upgrade, so there is nothing wrong with it other than I was looking to beef it up a bit. It has never been overclocked either, so no burn in to worry about. Check out the ebay auction and feel free to bid on it if you're interested. All the specs and specific details can be found there.Thanks!