I have been loving my 8GB iPod Touch since I got it last Christmas, and after jailbreaking it the moment I got it I have played with all the fun (and useful) community-built applications for it. There are reasons why I don’t have an iPhone yet, however. I’d love to use one as it could make my personal and accelerating business life much more efficient. I have a few major caveats that I expected the Internet community to have solved a while ago: I have Verizon, and like it (for now), so I have to wait for the 3G version to come out this summer, but where is a hacked USB interface for the iPod Touch and iPhone? I hate iTunes, and since the entire filesystem and bootloader for both devices has now been hacked and made accessible, why hasn’t anyone rewritten the USB interface on these devices to let any program access and manipulate them?
Since starting this brief I have installed Ubuntu’s new version, 8.04 Hardy Heron (if this is any indication of my thoughts on this Linux operating system. ) This brief will document my experience with installing and using the popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, as a primary operating system. My last experience with Linux was several years ago with Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake release. While impressed with the capabilities of such an insignificant operating system (at least to me), I was dissapointed with the hardware support. I could never actually get my graphics and network devices working properly with the operating system. I realize this is a limitation of Linux in general as most hardware vendors only write drivers for major operating systems, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth. Thus, I was rather skeptical of Gutsy. While intruiged by the Open Source community and love their software for web-server work, I didn’t expect to be able to transition to Linux as a desktop replacement. I have just gotten too used to the interoptability (albiet error-filled) of the Windows environment. It may not be the best, but it’s the most popular, so you are almost guaranteed to “make it work”. So, without very high hopes, I started my journey.