However, just recently on 13th May, the newly updated OpenJDK that includes the updates plugin has been released.

So install the following, as root:

yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk.i686 java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin.i686

If you’ve been using the Sun Java workaround then do as follows, also as root, by making the selection for OpenJDK:

/usr/sbin/alternatives --config java

Then do the following, again as root (for 32-bit), selecting IcedTeaPlugin.so:

/usr/sbin/alternatives --config libjavaplugin.so

Or if you’re on a 64-bit system, do the following as root, selecting IcedTeaPlugin.so:

/usr/sbin/alternatives --config libjavaplugin.so.x86_64

If you’ve previously used the Sun Java workaround you may want to also delete the symbolic link that you created. You can do this by executing the following as root:

rm /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libnpjp2.so

You’ll probably need to restart Firefox for the change to work. You may wish to verify that everything has worked correctly by entering about:plugins into the location bar in Firefox, and searching for a mention for IcedTea.

Credit goes to Mauriat Miranda for the latter tips. Additionally, more information on the general problem can be found in this Fedora Forum thread.

I came across a fix though, whilst trying to install the Linux RTS game Spring. They even have the problem listed in their FAQ here (Under: Graphics: I use an ATI or Intel graphic card on Linux with Open-Source drivers, and the map is all white! Is there a solution?), although I didn’t see it for the longest time.

Follow the instructions there. Which in short is to install using your package manager the following two packages: ‘driconf and ‘mesa-libGL-devel’ (as it is named in Fedora Linux, there might be a slight naming difference in other distributions).

Once you’ve done this, you should find a nice graphical interface to configure a number of options to do with your graphics driver. You’ll find it under, ‘System -> Preferences -> Driconf‘. The specific option you need to change is, to enable the patented S3TC texture compression. I restate that you want this option turned on.

I’m not disappointed that everybody is “love-bombing” Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. I’d align myself most of all with them. I’m happy they’ll be on the front-page of most newspapers tomorrow.

I am however cynical at this feigned shock, to me, it appears a tactic to sell papers as always. Just a shame to here nobody telling it how it was, or at least certainly appeared to me.

Also, perhaps it was just me, but I didn’t think that the chairman was tough enough, or fair enough on all of them. It seemed that a lot of the time was focussed on Gordon Brown and David Cameron arguing with each other. Proper rebuttals were also cut short. Maybe it was just the strict format?

Gordon Brown faired far better than I thought he might. Having watched Prime Minister’s Questions many times, I’m used to seeing David Cameron attacking Brown and doing it successfully. I’m also used to both Labour and the Conservatives jeering at Nick Clegg whenever he stands up (which really does show we need a more representative electoral system, if according to the immediate poll, the almost absolute majority of the pollees(?) thought Clegg had won). Brown was on the offensive and I thought he performed admirably, absorbing hits from both Clegg and Cameron (alright, mostly awkwardly smiling it off) and actively sought to expose Cameron’s lack of substance on policy. As well as his failure to protect other services apart from the NHS and therefore, in effect cutting. On balance, which is something that Brown does. It is with perhaps this point that really shines for the Lib Dems, despite failed attacks on their credibility on economics.

David Cameron did perform well, but under expectations. He didn’t act like he does in PMQs and peculiarly, although perhaps strategically, he did not rise to Brown’s directed attacks. Maybe this was an attempt to appear the more reasoned, the more adult and Prime Ministerial.

I’m not going to talk more about the debate, it was very interesting though and its significance to the general election campaign of 2010, and to the campaigns in the future, provokes much thought.

What I do think is wrong, is the confident assertion from Labour, the Conservatives and political pundits that the Liberal Democrats won’t win. In my opinion, many people would like to vote for the Liberal Democrats, but in constituencies such as mine (Spelthorne) there’s simply no point. A wasted vote. The fact that Vince Cable is regarded by the public, as the man most trusted with the economy. That there was such a strong opinion in favour of Nick Clegg’s performance tonight. Are small examples of why our politics is broken. It is perhaps now, that this is also the feeling of public opinion now. Hopefully this correlation can have an actual effect, and give us constitutional change.

If this immediate poll is to be believed, and I don’t discount all of its usefulness, then Brown is surely out. Unfortunately for him, I believe that the overwhelming national opinion is fatigue and disaffection with Labour. Gordon Brown does end up being a scapegoat (sometimes arguably deserved) for general problems of the time, and layovers from Tony Blair’s long premiership.

Clegg, Cameron and Brown — they’re all good men. That’s what came across to me. All passionate, with differing opinions. Polls are just polls. Debates are just academic. What matters is May 6th. I believe the introduction of televised debates to our electoral campaigns will give more opportunity to discern between the parties (as it is already proving), and hopefully a bit more colour. Their real impact, has yet to be seen. I am disappointed at the shallow analysis so far.

Some searching later, still no answer. So I’ve finally taken the drastic step of ripping it all out and then putting it all back in again. Thank God it all works fine so far *crosses fingers*.

Exams are coming up, but hopefully I can polish of some of that content that I’ve been harping on about. No the Pandora has not been released yet.

If you want to try it out you need to do the following as root in a terminal:

yum install firefox --enablerepo=rawhide

Most of my extensions work fine with Firefox 3.6, including Mozilla Weave — which has an increasing importance to me as I use it to sync my bookmarks, history and passwords among other things across installations — Adblock Plus and Flashblock, which really are the only other extensions that I consider really important to me. Unfortunately Optimoz Tweaks does not work anymore neither does a similar extension Sidebar Autohide.

I haven’t used Google’s Chrome browser and I don’t want to, I do know that a lot of tech-people are impressed with it and everybody seems to rave about its speed, perhaps it’s brand loyalty, it’s certainly some sort of familiarity and loyalty that keeps me with Firefox so I’m afraid I won’t have any base of comparison apart from the previous version Firefox 3.5, which admittedly was sluggish at times.

Quite noticeably to me there are speed improvements in general usage, especially with AJAX-ified websites, even writing this in WordPress’ default editor, it is no longer slow when backspacing or typing, it’s as fast as it should be.

Something as simple as scrolling, strangely is much faster.

Start-up time has improved considerably and it doesn’t appear to have that old Firefox hang-up of staying in memory for awhile after you close it. I can close it, launch it again with out having a duplicate process warning. Even with a large number of tabs it starts quicker and shuts down swiftly. Users of Firefox 3.5 will know that if you have it set to save your open tabs on exit it can take an age to start-up and become responsive but this really has improved.

The ‘Awesomebar’ really is awesome now, there used to be a delay when typing in search queries where I presumed it was trawling the database, especially the first time you would use it after a cold start. Now it’s lightning-quick as it should be and I can see no delay nor any disk drive usage.

Personas I have no current inclination to use but you must admit that the Personas website is awesome, just mousing over a potential persona will instantly preview it: it looks fantastic!

What I call ‘heavy’ websites such as Facebook are noticeably faster, Mozilla say there is a ~20% improvement between this and the previous version, with regards to Javascript heavy websites but it feels more than this.

On a side note YouTube and Vimeo have publicly announced that they’re to test and perhaps adopt the HTML5 video tag to use as a free video player on their websites, replacing Adobe’s Flash player. However they’re still using the patent-encumbered H.264 codec to encode their videos and not the out-of-the-box supported Ogg Theora codec that is contained within Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 — this is a puzzling decision as I don’t believe the work would be that much, all I can believe is that the videos were encoded in H.264 anyway and that it would be harder to switch this video backend immediately, especially given that it is just a preliminary test. I do hope however that they move towards Ogg Theora, I see no reason not to; even claims that Theora’s efficiency aren’t as good as H.264′s are negligible compared to the massive benefits. Firefox usage commands around ~25% of the world’s browser marketshare so it is significant that these test video sites are not supported. It should be the websites bowing down to Firefox not Mozilla relinquishing its principles on this.

What a splendid release. Mozilla Firefox 3.6 is noticeably improved over its predecessor in speed and also features that we might start seeing utilised more, such as improvements to the open video support: for example full-screen mode. It’s a solid release and it’s been made infinitely more usable on Fedora 12 Linux in so many ways. I’m looking forward to trying to crash it!

Update: Since writing the review I’ve encountered a few issues. Namely the Java plugin not working. On Fedora 12 by default there is no Sun Java but only OpenJDK and corresponding plugin however there does not appear to be a way to get OpenJDK to work with Firefox 3.6 at this time. You must install Sun Java (use this link, it’s i586 32-bit) instead.

In a terminal navigate to the download directory (if using the Firefox default directory you can use the following command):

cd Download/

Now make the .bin file executable, you need to be root:

chmod +x jre-6u18-linux-i586

Then you can run the .bin file with:

./jre-6u18-linux-i586

You will need to press the space-bar till you get to the end of the licensing terms where it will prompt you. Follow the prompts until completed.

If you’ve used the download link I provided here and you’re using Fedora then the following steps should work for you. You need to create a symbolic link from the new-style Java plugin to the Mozilla Firefox plugins directory.

You do this as follows, also as root:

ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_18/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

Restart Firefox and check everything is working okay. One way of doing this would be typing about:plugins and hitting enter, into the URL bar. This will bring up a list of all installed plugins, if you can find somewhere a listing for Java then it has most likely worked.

Source , Source 2.

Update 2: After further use of Firefox 3.6 I’ve decided I do not like the introduced new tab behaviour. Which is that a link will open to the right of the current tab and not at the end of the tab bar. If you want to switch back to the old behaviour then enter about:config into the URL bar and then paste the following into the filter:

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent

Double-click this value so it becomes bold (to reflect that it has changed from the default value) and has a value of false.

I was a bit concerned when moving from the wholly IBM made T41p to the Lenovo manufactured T61 there was a difference, and that is worrying when holding a very much loved brand in its hands. The T61 made a number of compromises from the old ‘p’ performance model. Going from a 4:3 aspect ratio and screen resolution of 1400×1050, to a widescreen 16:10 and resolution of 1280×800 is a big change, you lose that vertical screen real-estate and greater resolution in general but on the upside the newer LCD was brighter.

Moving to the T400, I again noticed a considerable improvement in the brightness of the LCD display and at this point had become used to the more restricted resolution, if anything it saved my eyes.

Another thing about the older Thinkpads were they used to get very hot, probably contributed to by the performance discrete-graphics which were lacking in my T61. The T400 on the other hand has ‘switchable graphics’, both integrated and discrete graphics chipsets that can be selected in the BIOS as well as at runtime if there is OS support (no there is currently no Linux support for this). What struck me was that the T400 was even cooler than the T61 despite having both graphics chipsets inside it. This can be attributed to the refinement in processor production, moving to smaller manufacturing processes means a smaller thermal output, this coupled with an improvement in fan and cooling technology — is visible if you look at the heatsinks behind the fan grilles, they’re now copper and not aluminum — there were also improvements made to the design to make them more efficient. I should note that under Linux the laptop is cooler in most situations than under Windows, at least for the integrated graphics. I talk at length about these things because they’re noticeable factors and are quite important if you use a machine day in day out.

A smaller difference is the improvement in weight and size which although slight is noticeable and much welcomed.

Of course with increased specifications there is increased power but what makes this even more amazing is that the power is so much greater and yet the heat and weight are the same if not lower. Moving up to an Intel Core2 Duo instead of just the Intel Core does make a difference, perhaps the faster DDR3 RAM also plays a part in this; now that I have upgraded my RAM to 4GB I find using swap space almost a thing of the past.

I would always recommend getting a desktop-speed, that is 7200RPM, hard disk drive as this is the bottleneck in most systems I just swapped over my T61′s HDD, only having to remove one screw to gain access to it (it is placed on a caddy with shock absorbers).

These details bring me to another strength of Thinkpads in general customisability and support. One cannot argue with a three-year on site warranty, that’s next day support including parts and labour, brilliant. With the help of ThinkWiki and the Thinkpads.com forum as a guide, one has enough information to maintain this system for a long time. Thinkpads are built to facilitate easy access and modularity, they publish a hardware specification called the Hardware Maintenance Manual (HMM) (link for the T400 HMM) that shows you step-by-step, with exploded view diagrams for help, how to assemble and disassemble your individual Thinkpad model. Things that would normally be a chore to replace if they went wrong on other manufacturers laptops, like disc drives, are simple as they are modularised in the form of the UltraBay, a removable disc drive. The HDD as I have mentioned is also on an easy access and removal caddy and the RAM is not very hard at all to replace. What’s more many of these more minor things such as replacing the RAM do not void your warranty and if something goes wrong, sometimes Lenovo will merely send out the part, so well documented and easy is the process of disassembly, it’s a real ‘feature’ for me.

The keyboard remains one of the chief components that bring people to the Thinkpad line, it is world renowned and still holds up well to this reputation. If you go into a laptop shop, just press down firmly on the keys in the middle of the keyboard, watch it bend and flex, sometimes quite a lot. Thinkpads don’t really suffer from this and typing on the T400 is a joy. Night typing is helped with the continued presence of the ThinkLight, an LED that lights up the keyboard to an extent (Fn+Page Up).

The speakers are no longer located on the base, facing downwards towards the user but are on the sides of the keyboard, they’re noticeably louder than in previous models, especially than the T41p.

Battery life is very good, much improved over the T61 generation despite only possessing a 4-cell battery, using the Windows-only Lenovo BatteryStretch technology I could get 4 hours of battery time, running under reduced conditions however. There are 4, 6 and 9-cell batteries available which again, is not something you see from all manufacturers. Indeed people regularly report reaching over 8 hours on Windows using the 9-cell battery. In Linux equally battery life is good from a hardware perspective, but also I believe there’s been software improvements as it is easy to get the laptop down to around 10W usage which I found very hard to do on older models, this will easily get you 3 hours of battery life at half screen-brightness using the same 4-cell battery,

A brief note regarding Linux support, like most Thinkpads the T400 is well supported on Linux, it’s all documented on the ThinkWiki where you’ll also find user installation notes. There are a couple of things that still as of today do not work perfectly. The audio although working becomes very quiet when adjusted towards the middle of the slider and below and the mute key is not registered by the on-screen display but does mute, as it works in hardware not software [Update: I have found out that this is supposedly fixed in Kernel 2.6.33 and has to do with the BIOS having an ALSA driver, it should now mute at boot and display an OSD]. As I have noted above switchable graphics cannot be fully utilised, switched, at runtime as there is no support in the drivers and may never be, hopefully in a later revision of this technology. The Intel 5300AGN wireless chipset is supported out of the box, within the kernel, and provides a very good range and quality link. The keyboard’s function-key combinations and special keys do work, such as the ThinkLight and even the ones located on the Function keys are supported in large part by ibm-acpi, a kernel package. Integrated graphics provided by Intel work out of the box and work reasonably well, apart from some 3D games where there appears to be some driver peculiarities that cause graphical glitches, the discrete ATI HD3470 is just picking up basic open source 3D support now.

There are a few let-downs when it comes to the T400, not all of them Lenovo’s fault. It would’ve been nice to have a digital video-out in the form of DisplayPort or DVI (which is available on the dock), this was achieved in the thinner and lighter X300 so there was no real reason for the omission here. The only other thing really missing for future-proofness would be USB3 as this already has 802.11n wireless built-in, however that is not Lenovo’s fault and isn’t supported in the chipset.

In conclusion, the Thinkpad T400 is a very well balanced laptop in terms of performance versus weight. It is very powerful and not only uses the latest processor which supports x86-64 as well as advanced virtualisation capabilities but also has a very practical and usable switchable graphics chipset that can provide battery life gains or accelerated graphical power for games or work, when needed; the implementation really is very good falling back to the reliable BIOS switch if there is no OS support, as on Linux. The machine is so powerful in fact that working on this laptop is indeed a step up from my not-too-old desktop computer. I can run games such as Team Fortress 2 and all the productivity software I can shake a fist at, the only issue is really storage, my model only came with an 80GB 5400RPM disk drive but I swapped it out for a 200GB 7200RPM drive, and with greater than 500GB 7200RPM notebook HDDs coming out this isn’t an insurmountable problem. The T400 is more powerful than any of my friends’ machines and yet I got it for cheaper, with the possibility of a longer life in terms of the warranty and the better documentation, spare parts and community support. It has really enabled me to move to this as my sole computer and that is testament, there is not much I cannot do on it.

I hope this hasn’t been a too wishy-washy review, it’s more a general impression to my specific use case than a side-by-side comparison to its competitors. In essence it’s just a great machine, the best Thinkpad I have used so far.

After much searching I found this forum thread with reports from many others also experiencing this problem, this post in particular solves the issue, so I didn’t see any need to reproduce its clear instruction.

It involves using ‘gconf-editor’ to add some entries, a bit like editing the Windows registry.

Hope it helps someone.

In order to get rid of this minor but irritating issue one needs to edit the file ‘grub.conf’, to do this you need to become root (use the command ‘su’, hit enter then type your root password, or if you have ‘sudo’ set up just append ‘sudo’ to the front of the command). The actual command is:

# gedit /boot/grub/grub.conf

My file looks like this, you need to add ‘verbose=0′ to the file, I have highlighted it in bold in my example:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,4)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda8
#          initrd /initrd-[generic-]version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,4)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
verbose=0
title Fedora (2.6.31.9-174.fc12.i686.PAE)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.31.9-174.fc12.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=9897fdc8-b5ea-46f8-aa06-dd172ae4a63e noiswmd LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=uk rhgb quiet
initrd /initramfs-2.6.31.9-174.fc12.i686.PAE.img
title Windows Vista
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1


I hope that helps somebody and I really hope it gets fixed by default, especially given it’s such an easy fix.

There are some benefits I can see for applications or applets (small applications, usually on the desktop) in there can be tighter integration, with native elements and styling. However I do not believe that this integration cannot be achieved either through a mobile-oriented website or similarly by deploying web based technologies to create these applications, much in the way that Mozilla Firefox add-ons are generally platform agnostic because they use standard open web technologies such as Javascript and CSS.

We’re moving into a time when more and more phones are going to have the ‘full’ internet on them so that at least access can be achieved, whether or not the device is capable of providing the same experience is different, and yet what this phone centric model is creating is fragmentation. Anyone who doesn’t own an iPhone may appear a second-class citizen when it comes to being a user of the internet. This shouldn’t be so, but of course it is Apple’s great success story that they’ve managed to monetise, in many cases, something that should have been and was essentially free, access to the internet.

With a unification in the capability of these devices, greater power, we should be seeing a dissemination of the internet not the same old story of an application only being available on UIQ phones, or Symbian phones and now Apple phones.

What’s wrong with some simple user-agent sniffing to attempt to detect a mobile web browser and give an optimised version? The BBC don’t need an application to provide a very fulfilling and complete experience through their recently revamped mobile website. You can still provide interactivity and in a way that reaches out to the largest userbase.

One cannot really blame Apple in its success, after all it is not forcing these companies to make these applications, they’re only incentivised by the shear mindshare and popularity that Apple has generated. Phones that really are capable of mobile computing, iPhones and N900s to name a few should really be looking to have a universal way of creating applets that will run on any platform — I thought this was what the WRT effort was for. Hopefully the proliferation of the cross-platform QT should alleviate this to an extent but I doubt that it’ll be pushed much by Nokia’s competitors, and why should they. Therefore I would like to see a harmonised effort in this respect. It’s simply better for everyone, the problem is at the moment why would Apple want to change this situation, it benefits them and in fairness I haven’t seen Nokia or any other major manufacturers pursuing a standardised approach to things.

So this is just my thoughts on operating systems for smartphones. I used to be quite biased in favour of Symbian devices (I own an N82 and did a lot of research before hand) but with the N97 and 5800 it’s clear that even with ‘Symbian OS 9.4 5th edition’ it’s like trying to put a square peg in a round hole – it’s not going to work without force and even then it’s misshapen.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous tract about the new Maemo 5 and N900 device from Nokia smartphones are trickling down to the mass-market, unfortunately for Nokia, these new devices most of the time are not running Symbian OS and I am now seeing that even with becoming open source, the Symbian Foundation will not be able to accelerate that pace of innovation quickly enough, to make manufacturers put it on their device. Coming back to the N97, the N97 Mini even, and with the recent 2.0 firmware update, it’s just not fit for purpose. Nokia are fighting a rearguard action against a disruptive innovator, who got to the game ahead of them, or at least innovated a lot faster. I’m talking about Google here, the gorilla in the corner of the room that looks as if it’s about to beat everyone around the head – and Google will, given half the chance. Do no evil my arse. Look at what happened with Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox web browser, Google saw Mozilla making head-way, supported them and then pilfered Ben Goodger, the Lead Developer, along with a list of others and still bankrolls Mozilla to a large degree; now they’re competing head to head with the Chrome browser. My point is that Google’s like the Roman empire, it sees somebody doing something better than them and it copies them, and throws its entire weight behind it – it’s so aggressive. Google maintains this nice and friendly veil of ‘free’, as in beer and even supporting the open source community (see all the people who are on the Google payroll, Google’s summer of code) which is a very seductive principle, but just how altruistic is it as a company? It’s a public company, accountable to share holders, despite its generous track record, a lot of what they have done can be seen to be self motivated, and that isn’t a bad thing for a public company, however one needs to always be aware of it. Android might possibly be dominating the market in terms of new hardware sales, the ones that count. Look at Nokia’s recent historic loss while Apple has made a profit and increased market share, Google’s always making a profit with that huge valuation provided by its stock price.

I’ve briefly mentioned Apple, who must be respected. Where’s Microsoft in this? There was a recent interview with Steve Ballmer on the Engadget Show, where Ballmer mentioned that there are plans to iterate Windows Mobile faster and bring their services together, uniting Zune with Windows Mobile. I’m intent to believe him but at present Windows Mobile doesn’t have either much market share or mind share in the mobile phone space. However they’ve become very successful with the Xbox 360 and the way it has become a portal to subscriptions (Xbox Live Gold) and services based around this (Netflix, Sky Player). I’m sure that the mobile space is where the money is, and this has been born out, as I read in last week’s Guardian Technology supplement regarding mobile computer sales. Why is Microsoft not pushing this more?

Nokia may have had Maemo in the works and on devices, for years; it may be releasing Symbian as open source and it does own QT Software, which is a massive boon if it can really pull this cross-platform interlinkage together quickly enough. However Android is open source, no matter what this thought provoking article says and it has moved at such an incredible pace that it even though it was technically late to the party, it’s the one everybody wants to dance with. It is winning manufacturer contracts all over the place with good reason, it’s slick and it’s far more competitive against the iPhone OS than Symbian 5th Edition is. Maemo wins on all counts of openness but even with the huge advantage of a community, the N900 is one device, and a marginal device just like all the other internet tablets, even though this one version has a phone built in. Until Nokia can start winning real mind share again it won’t win market share.

As for the new Palm Pre and WebOS, it’s just been released over here in the UK and as such a small player I don’t think it’s going to grab much mind share amongst this now crowded market place.