Second Nature

Did you hear that bombastic Blagojevich was ousted by the Illinois senate today?

It seems that his Security entourage had, "Good riddance!" feelings about the whole debacle, since they dropped him like a hot potato as soon as the Senate announced their decision--one officer leaving a child's car seat by Blagojevich's garage and driving away.

Now, if we can get Sarah Palin to make a similar fade into political obscurity, we can concentrate on reading about octuplets and boggling at the logistics ahead for that family.

A while back, I mentioned that there seems to be an issue with the distribution of SanDisk USB jump drives containing that scourge called "U3".

Well, there's still an issue with this kind of ©®@¶ happening with what should remain OS-Agnostic hardware--flash memory products.

Yesterday I happened to drop by a Radio Shack franchise to check to see what their stock situation was regarding DTV converter boxes; mainly because the differently-branded, but identically-priced box, carried by Rite-Aid, is junk.

I assured myself that Radio Shack has a better box for the same price, and has plenty of them; but, on my way out of the store, I happened to notice that their pricing on 8GB Cruzer Micro USB jump drives exceeded their pricing on 8GB SDHC Micro flash media.

A 8GB Cruzer Micro USB jump drive was selling for $24.⁹⁵(US)--on sale--while an 8GB SDHC Micro card was priced at $19.⁹⁵(US); but the jump drive was inconspicuously marked as possessing U3 crippleware. The 8GB SDHC Micro card possessed no such disability.

While I was looking at the jump drive price tag, I remembered that I had posted links to solutions for this problem, back in November, 2007, and purposed to remember to remind you folks that there is hope (or, at least, there was back in November) for those stuck with U3-crippled jump drives...so, here you go...almost verbatim from my earlier mention of this issue:

SanDisk has published a U3 Launchpad Removal Tool; which, unfortunately, needs to be run under a windoze environment, so you might want to take yours over to Fry's Electronics, Office Depot or CompUSA to run the w32 binary.

U3, Inc. has probably also been under a bit of pressure to offer a way to rid your flash storage media of their invasive ©®@¶, so they, too, have published a U3 nuking tool which is windoze-centric as well.

Mind you, folks, it grinds me that SanDisk came up with this garbageware, and formed U3 to foist it off on an unsuspecting public; but did not develop tools to remove the junk on ALL THREE prevalent Operating System platforms out there.

They first covered their bases on windoze--only after some folks working with some retail chain "Geek Squad" (sorry, don't remember which chain has that pseudo-military group) did it for them--then got their act together, providing a similar removal tool for mac-users.

Linux users are out of luck, according to both U3 and SanDisk, so you'd better go over to Circuit City, Staples, Office Depot Fry's or Best Buy to do the dirty work--if you don't have access to a windoze-based heap.

Morgantown, WV, Jan 26, 2009 -- Warren has uploaded ISO files for RC2 of SimplyMEPIS 8.0 to the MEPIS pools. The files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-CD_7.9.95-rc2_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-CD_7.9.95-rc2_64.iso.

For RC2, the kernel has been updated to upstream version, 2.6.27.12. Kvm 83 is available from the MEPIS pool to better match the virtualization configuration of the MEPIS kernel. Grub has been updated to fix a "stage 2" error that was encountered in some rare circumstances. The MEPIS Assistants were updated to work with virtio drivers. Bind9 was updated to 9.6.0-P1 to support NSEC3 for DNSsec.

SimplyMEPIS developer, Warren Woodford, reports, "I apologize to anyone who was expecting 8.0 to be final by now. It's taking longer than I had hoped but I think we are very close to a final release. MEPIS is based on Debian Stable and our delays also gives time for Lenny to become final. The changes from the developers at Debian have been coming very quickly. At this rate they will finish Lenny soon."

ISO images of new MEPIS pre-releases are published to the 'testing' subdirectory at the MEPIS Subscriber's Site and at MEPIS public mirrors. To support the ongoing development of MEPIS, community users are encouraged to go to the MEPIS store at http://www.mepis.org and become MEPIS subscribers.

About SimplyMEPIS
SimplyMEPIS is a mature and ready to use desktop operating system for PCs and Apple computers that have Intel or AMD 32 or 64 bit processors. It is easier than Vista and intuitive for XP and Win98 users. SimplyMEPIS includes all of the applications that most users need and want. SimplyMEPIS is designed to replace or work side by side with Vista or XP on PCs and OSX on Apple computers.

About MEPIS LLC
Founded in 2002 by Silicon Valley veteran Warren Woodford, MEPIS LLC provides senior consulting services for product strategy, architecture design, business and systems analysis, and cross-platform software development. MEPIS also develops and maintains SimplyMEPIS, a well regarded community release of desktop Linux, that functions as the testbed for the core of a Linux product line for deploying secure server and desktop solutions.

As I mentioned, over at my web log entry at MEPIS.org, if you have any problems with the mirror site I'm providing for SimplyMEPIS, please report those problems to "mepis dot mirror at gmail dot com" and I'll fix things-up for you.