You do not need a credit card to sign up for the free voip plan, but after registering you will need to add one to your account profile. Add a traditional phone number to you account (This costs $15 for 3 years). You can then enable voicemail through the portal and add an email address for forwarding.

Your done. Just forward whichever number you like to the pennytel number you just signed up for. As my home plan has unlimited local calls the forwards cost me nothing. $15 for a voicemail service with email forwarding seemed pretty reasonable to me.

What I do want to say is that the official instructions from the Cyanogenmod wiki work, and are simpler than anything else I read. So follow them.

The Nook Color is a tablet disguised as an ereader. Spec wise it is lacking a few things, but the build quality is brilliant and it is cheap.

I ordered a refurbished unit from ebay for $199.00. At the time this made it about $190.00 AUD. They only ship the the US so I sent it to an address provided by ComGateway. I expected to be billed for about $30 shipping to Australia, but ComGateway charged me the cost of a 2kg package. So it came in at just over $40. Of course I am not about to argue when my Nook is sitting in their warehouse. The other disappointing thing for me was that is sat in Portland at the ComGateway address for 4 days before it was shipped.

But it was shipped and there were no problems, it was just more expensive and slower than I expected.

If you want to use the Nook with the original firmware (though why would you) first register an account with B&N online using a US address, also skip the credit card setup, unless you have a US credit card.

But with CM7 this thing is brilliant. Fast and a whole bunch more functional. I no-longer have tablet envy.

I have been doing things, but they have been un-interesting, at least from a blog point of view. Which I do find troubling.

Uninteresting work tends to make me a little restless.

When a couple of current projects come to an end there may be some interesting things to blog.

And it is easy to get compiz working with it. Really easy. One command easy.

# yum install compiz compiz-gnome compiz-manager compiz-plugins main


Now one you enter your username at GDM you will be presented with a pull-down from here you can select. “Classic GNOME with Compiz”.

User fpmurphy over at fedoraforum has posted a shell extension that removes the offending icon.

I have created a tarball of the extension. Download it here and extract it to “~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions”

$ cd ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
$ unzip gnome-shell-extensions-noa11y.zip

Then restart the shell. Hit “Alt+f2″, and type “r”.

Grab it here.

I decided to dump Ubuntu as my primary desktop for a couple of reasons. I think Ubuntu is a more polished desktop, and provides a better user experience over-all, especially for a regular user, and I like its Debian heritage and package system. But I do not like Unity. I am not going to debate it’s pros/cons here it has been done all over the interwebs. I simply don’t like it, and do not think it should be built the way it is. Unity should be built upstream, as an alternative shell to Gnome, not inside Ubuntu’s closed walls, and then customized for Ubuntu later on. Canonical could learn from red-hats previous mistakes and successes in this regard.

I was also very disappointed with the way Ubuntu handled the inclusion of Banshee and with the outcomes from that debacle.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Fedora and I like the community built around it, but I was also skeptical of the Fedora choice to ship Gnome-Shell. So I gave the Alpha a spin.

And I like it. It took a little getting used to, but I moved back to the old gnome-panel interface and I missed the changes now present in gnome-shell. So much that I decided months out from release to stick with Fedora 15 as my primary installation.

I am using this as a desktop, so my comments are really only relevant in that space, but a couple of thoughts.

SE Linux.

Technically SELinux is brilliant. But on a desktop it gets in the way, and the alerts will make no sense to a regular user. After an update I had to set my policy to permissive to simply be able to login again (Not a real complaint, it is Alpha). But until work is done to make the whole thing a lot clearer to non-technical users every howto is still going to start with, “Turn off selinux”. If I build a live respin, I will probably disable selinux on install.

GNOME Shell

The preferences are sparse, and this is by design, but I think most users, after getting used to the interface, are going to won’t more customization option. For the technically minded people install “dconf-editor”. If you want things a little simpler check out “gnome-tweak-tool“.

But personally, after getting comfortable with the shell, I think it is a better way to work. I like managing my work-flow with dynamic workspaces. A few extra keyboard shortcuts would come in handy.

I also have a usability problem with the notification tray. When there are multiple icons, you hover over the icon, which then moves to display the name of the application. If you need to click on an icon for options it has moved some arbitrary number of pixels away. It is only a little thing, but it annoys me no end. I think rather than shuffling icons, the title could simply be displayed as a pop-op, hint style.

Adding things and customization

Getting things to work with Fedora is just a little bit tricky. 32 bit flash on 64 bit system requires a visit to the wiki. Yum doesn’t process architecture dependencies properly, so whenever an app was only available 32 bit, like Skype, it would take a bit of a forum search to find a solution for installation. And I think that has always hindered Fedora adoption. The learning curve is just a bit steeper than Ubuntu. Sure a visit to a  Fedora FAQ will normally fix you up. but it takes a bit of investigation.

But all that said. I am back on very familiar Fedora soil, and I couldn’t be happier. I will try when writing blog posts to include instructions for Fedora/RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu/Debian. I work with all of them. But I am a little lazy, so instead there will probably be a mash of howto’s each one on whatever distro the problem I was fixing was based.

I have been running Fedora 15. It is kinda buggy, (expected it’s alpha,) but I am actually finding gnome-shell growing on me.

Firefox 4 in included, but I still find I prefer Google Chrome, trouble is, it looks out of place on the desktop. I used this site and threw together a quick theme. It’s not perfect, but feel free to download it.

Turns out it is not an uncommon complaint: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1013344

There are a heap more threads like this online.

Basically the option is hidden away in the Keyboard preferences.

See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME_2.28_Changes#Universal_Accessibility_Icon_Stuck_in_Panel