The real battle in the phone world isn't iPhone against the rest of the world, it's closed platforms versus open. OpenMoko promises to be the Ubuntu of the phone world. I met up with the brains behind the project at CES, and wrote up the meeting for The Register:

While all eyes may have been on San Francisco and the launch of the developer-unfriendly Apple iPhone, the real game changers were demonstrating their strategy at CES 2007, in Las Vegas.

While the hardware may be similar, the strategy is a complete reversal of Apple's closed platform and proprietary hardware. OpenMokois an open Linux-based mobile application development platform that's designed to help operators and developers build innovative applications on top of a basic phone platform.

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I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the final hardware in March.

I know we're not the only folks around with a Toshiba Portege R100...

A failed software install left ours blue-screening on boot due to a corrupted driver. While we've got a USB DVD drive in the house, the R100 doesn't support USB CD or DVD booting. I've spent a goodly chunk of the afternoon trying to find someway of getting it to work.

DUSE, the DOS USB project doesn't work with the R100's USB hardware (though it may well for many other platforms). However, I was able to track down a site with a copy of Toshiba's own recovery boot floppy software - which is conspicuously absent from the UK site.

You'll probably need to add files like SMARTDRV to the disk just to be sure...

It's not just for recovering Windows installs - you can also use it to install Linux or any other OS on your laptop. OpenSolaris, anyone?