Latest Fedora 11 Fixes Resolve User Issues

Newsletter

This is the first of what I hope to be a fairly regular newsletter intended to inform Millennium Technology Consulting LLC customers of the latest information that may affect their Linux installations. Of course this will also help anyone who reads this newsletter even if you are not one of my customers, but that is OK too.

Latest Fedora 11 Fixes Resolve User Issues

Over the last few weeks there have been many fixes to Fedora 11 including a number of security updates. These have resolved several problems affecting many users.

HP Printer Issues

About a month ago an update to the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) caused Hewlett-Packard (HP) printers of all kinds to stop working.  The latest fixes have resolved these HP printer problems. After installing these updates your HP printers should work again.

Audio

Some issues with streaming audio playback have also been resolved. These issues have been around for a while and caused audio dropout during playback as well as just hung (stopped) playback of multimedia video streams, such as Flash video playbacks on web sites like CNN.

VirtualBox and USB

And, apparently, between these Fedora fixes and some upgrades to VirtualBox, some problems that prevented USB devices from being used inside virtual machine guests of all operating system types have also been resolved. This should eliminate the need to provide work-arounds to access USB devices from within the guest operating systems.

This affects anyone who needs to use USB connected devices in a guest operating system.

iPod and iPhone

I have been working with some customers to get iPods and iPhones working within Linux and have made some serious progress on this. Although some functionality exists with available Open Source applications such as Amarok and Banshee, there are some significant limitations not the least of which is the inability to download and use iTunes.

Now that issues with access to USB devices within a VirtualBox guest operating system have been resolved, I have found that my iPod (and presumably iPhones) can use the iTunes application very easily from within a virtual machine.

Scheduling Updates

If you are one of my customers, I will contact you in the next few days to schedule a time to perform the upgrade and make any other changes required to make things work correctly. If you are an iPhone or iPod user, this will include setting up your iTunes application in a Windows virtual machine using VirtualBox.