JEB's Blog

So, it’s now 2010 (almost). Two of the most heavily used non-Free programs on Linux would have to be Adobe Flash Player, and Skype VOIP client. While neither have open-sourced their offerings, both do offer Linux versions.

The down side is they only offer 32-bit versions.

After several years of AMD64 bit Linux (the Debian port to AMD 64 has a mailing list that started May 2003 – over 6.5 years ago). Skype have repackaged their 32 bit build in a package that has the correct dependencies to run on 64 bit Linux, but the executable is still 32-bit. So no clean 64 bit system! Boo hoo.

Come on Skype! Come on Adobe. Either keep up (6.5 years!) or set it Free!

Time for some more storage at home – the old 250 GB Freecom HDD was getting a little tight on space. So a quick stop on Christmas Eve at PC World (normally not a good experience) and I chanced upon a 1.5 TB Iomega drive at £80 or so. 6x the size – nice.
I was initially hesitant; the name Iomega normally is associated with the phrase “click of death”, a symptom of the old Iomega Zip disks of the 1990′s. However, the price point, and 10+ years of water under the bridge and them still being in business made me consider it a reasonable purchase.
The drive was instantly recognised by my Acer Aspire Revo (running Debian Linux). The disk auto-mounted with its VFAT file system no problem; however, instantly it started to… wait for it … click! Noooo!
I reformatted to make it a Physical Volume for LVM, and then made a new Logical Volume (LV) with an XFS file system. It seems the disk still does the clicking/ticking every once in a while, normally after some period of inactivity.
It’s about 4 – 7 clicks/ticks, about once every half a second, the entire episode lasting around 10 seconds.