Open source WIN

Another victory for open source. I've been trying to stay fairly cutting edge again at home -- with my Debian unstable and pretty up-to-date kernel builds. I'm usually surprised at just how easy things are now...

But my crappy little phone stopped automounting for some reason when I plugged it in. I managed to search and find this bug thread which suggested a similar problem and a patch for Nokia phones. A few minutes later I had downloaded the patch, applied it, and then tweaked it to match the manufacturer/product IDs of my silly phone.

It ended up looking something like this:

UNUSUAL_DEV(  0x0474, 0x0749, 0x0000, 0x0481,
        "Sanyo",
        "Sanyo Mass Storage",
        US_SC_DEVICE, US_PR_DEVICE, NULL,
        US_FL_FIX_CAPACITY),

One kernel compile and reboot later and it worked like a champ.

Of course, all this begs the question "Why did it happen in the first place?"...which is another topic completely. Having the ability to take ownership and fix the problem to get work done (until the upstream [kernel]) is priceless. You'll never get that same experience with your closed source OS.