I’ve been watching all the hype about Verizon updating it’s line of MotoDroid phones and getting annoyed about having to wait. Officially now, it’s been rolling out but they are projecting Aug. 18th for completing the roll-out. It’s an open phone, why can’t I update it myself? Well, I didn’t like the prospect of “bricking” it and having to shell out money for a new one. That said, I stumbled on this post from Phandroid and couldn’t help myself. I am now a Froyo user in just over 10 minutes. Easy, easy, easy!

There are a million posts out there that cover how to make an ISO image of a CD/DVD. For some reason I was having a particularly hard time with a specific disk. It had long file names, funny folder structures and I kept getting all uppercase file names. I tried the stock dd if=/dev/cdrom of=~/[file-name].iso first and found that it was just not cutting it. The below seemed to work the best on multiple CDs and formats.

mkisofs -r -J -l -d -allow-multidot -allow-leading-dots -joliet-long -no-bak -o ~/[name-of-file-or-disk].iso /media/[source-folder]

This article caught my eye as I was playing catch-up on my RSS subscriptions….
http://www.handlewithlinux.com/android-reverse-ssh

First off, XMind is a mind mapping program that I started using on a Mac, transferred to an Eclipse 3.4 plugin and have since downloaded and installed on any computer I have including my Linux machines at home. That said, there is a bit of an oddity when running it under linux. I couldn’t find any information on how to run the executable from outside of the unzipped folder. I have found that fix and wanted to share for anyone else who has had this issue. Below is what I have in place on a Fedora 9 install with Sun JDK 1.5.0…

1. Download the XMind Portable from their site
2. Unzip to /usr/local/xmind-portable/
3. Rename XMind for Linux to XMind-Linux
4. Open the config.ini file from XMind-Linux folder
5. Edit any paths to reflect your location of /usr/local/xmind-portable/XMind-Linux/
6. Copy all the values in this file and edit the lines to be a single line
7. Create your shortcut to /usr/local/xmind-portable/XMind-Linux/xmind and append the single line from step 6
8. Done!