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Manage music on Sony Ericsson K800i with Ubuntu without Disc2phone

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After a purchase of a Sony Ericsson K800i mobile phone I was keen to start loading it with music. Plugging it in by USB into my Ubuntu powered machine I was pleasantly surprised that it was just a simple drag and drop procedure.

The only problem was that when I went into the phones music player, the artists and track names were all badly corrupted. For example transferring an Orbital album, this album appeared in the music player as artists Orbita, Orbit and Orbi. It was clear that the phone was not reading the ID3 tag correctly from the mp3 file.
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How to – UK Three Mobile (3), Huawei E220 and Ubuntu Hardy

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After a recent price drop of a three mobile Huawei E220 HSDPA modem at £49.99 and a quick Google to tell me that it is supported by Kernel 2.6.20 onwards, I decided to make the purchase.

On the web there are a few forum and blog posts providing instructions on how to configure this modem using wvdial for various mobile networks worldwide.  However, I am going to explain the process to get your Huawei E220 working on Ubuntu Hardy for the UK Three Mobile Network using a graphical tool “Gnome PPP”.  As Gnome PPP is a graphical front end tool to wvdial, it is a lot tidier then having to keep a terminal window open as it can be docked to the notification area.
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How to – Broadcom BCM4310 Wireless, HP 530 Laptop, Ubuntu Hardy

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After a recent purchase of A HP 530 laptop and 2 weeks of trying to get a budget laptop to work with Vista, it was time to re-format and replace the vista virus with a operating system.

Its a bit of a joke that this laptop got sold with Vista.  With 1GB of Ram and a Celeron 1.6Ghz processor it was completely unfit for the purpose of running the installed Vista Home Basic.  After an upgrade to 2 GB of Ram and an HP extended 9 cell battery it was still uncapable but with a battery life of an hour and half instead of the “out of the box” forty five minutes battery life.  Interestingly after installing Ubuntu Hardy not only did the machines performance become more acceptable as it was not longer struggling with Vista’s bloat, but the surprise for me was that battery life increased to three and a half hours.  The unfortunate downside to Ubuntu was that the built in Broadcom BCM4310 wireless card did not work.
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