I found that it is related to the module e1000e, for example when i do

sudo rmmod e1000e

before the shutdown no automatic reboot is done.

Installation of Ubuntu on my new Thinkpad x220 i7 was a no brainer, as we know it from Ubuntu and it seems that installing an OS has never been so easy and fast. Every thing seems to be working out of the box, but looking closer there are some things that needs to be tweaked. As notes to myself, I am writing about how I fixed these problems in a series of posts.

The first thing that needs to be tuned is battery life. Under Windows7 I get with pre-installed settings about 10-11 hours of runtime. The conditions were brightness set to 20% with ethernet in use. Under Ubuntu 11.10 out of the box I got around 4-5 hours, and that is quite a difference with some room to optimization.

To get started I installed powertop, a command line tool to show which part drains the battery. To install just call in command line:

and then run it from command line with

You have 5 tabs (change with direction keys).

powertop tunables

On the overview tab you see how many Watts are being used now. My goal here is to go below 9W for light work and 7.5W for idling. Change to the tab Tunables, where you see everything that powertop thinks can be tuned (tagged with BAD). Use the direction keys to select those and with Enter-key toggle them, so they say GOOD. For me powertop was not able to scroll so you should make your terminal size to full-screen to see all available options.

On the overview tab of powertop you can observe which hard- or software parts are draining your energy. As usual the rule is turn off everything that you don’t need.

Then there has been a problem with recent Linux kernels with modern processors. For my Thinkpad x220 I added the following boot parameters to grub

pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1

Test them first by adding them on a normal boot process in grub (press e to edit boot parameters, see here). If this works for you then add them permanently to grub, by editing /etc/default/grub. (after editing you have to call update-grub once).

Finally I get idling around 7W usage and working on ethernet (wireless should be about the same) 9-10W. This gives me a battery life time of 10

Apple Inc do you really think that people are that stupid that they cannot differantiate between Apple (computers, Phones, Software,…) and a small Restaurant having nothing in common except 5 letters in the name? Because of this lawsuite the restaurant is risking to go bankrupt.

Go support either of those parties…buy a new iPhone, or, go and have lunch at appleaday.

UPDATE: The law suite lasts for over 9 months already, and it got feature in local news on 2011/11/03. (in french) here, older

<g:remoteLink controller="book" action="show" id="1" update="content">MyBook</g:remoteLink>

However, if you need to use any tag like remoteLink outside of a view, for example in a controller or service make sure to inject grailsApplication first

def grailsApplication

and then you can use the following call to get the link (in this case) as String

g.remoteLink(action:'show', controller:'book', id: '1', update:'content' ){MyBook}

Then the simple solution to the problem is to reboot your phone. For me at least it works. When the bug occurs, I reboot and the YouTube apps plays videos. At the same time I noticed that when the bug occurs, several music files (mp3?) don’t play. So if you encounter such a problem: “Try turning it on and off again!”

Just type about:memory into the address bar in Chromium and you will see on top of the page the memory usage for the open browsers. Find out on more about pages here.

About Memory - Chromium

Of course to run Kies you have to use Windows (XP, Vista or 7). Before getting started,

1. make a fresh install of Kies version 2.0.0.11014_49_2.
2. (Remove any existing Kies installation and I removed to installed drivers as well C:/Program Files/Samsung/drivers/uninstall.exe)
3. Then download Kies and install.
4. I closed all running services as Anti-virus,…but don’t know if this is necessary.
5. What I did I removed the SD card from the phone and the SIM card.
6. Turn the phone on, and connected it via USB to the computer.
7. Wait until windows installed all drivers and then started KIES.
8. I choose not to save any data to samsung and I did not make any backup (Skip Backup), I was lucky not to loose any data, but make sure you have no important data that you want to loose on the phone.
9. Then finally I choose to upgrade firmware and everything went fine from this point.

I guess the removal of the SD and SIM card where essential here. The first boot took like 5 minutes and then the phone is running fine with 2.2.1

This time I decided to test the latest available versions of browsers, on the floor are

• Chromium 12.0.700.0 (77774) (from daily-ppa)
• FireFox 4.0RC1
• FireFox 4.0b13pre (from the Mozilla/daily-ppa) known as MineField
• Opera 11.01 (latest stable release)

First of all, let’s see how the browsers perform on the ACID3 test, chromium and Opera perform 100/100 points whereas the firefox (both versions) lacks behind by 3 points, scoring a total of 97/100 points.

Another automated test is the peacekeeper browser test, which helps you to find out which browser runs best on your PC. The higher the score the better the browser performs on your computer. You can find the results here, for the browsers on my 6-years old Thinkpad x60:

1. Chromium: 4941
2. Opera: 3870
3. MineFire: 2481
4. FireFox: 2479

Definitely Chromium largely outperforms the others and I am again shocked how Firefox does perform in these tests. Just to remember Chrome v5 scored 3877 points, Opera 3300 and Firefox 1413. This means Chromium has gained more than 1000 points in this time, opera gained 500 points and Firefox about 1000 points.

However after these tests what is interesting to the user experience with a browser is not the speed itself, but how it feels. So these tests are performed on an up-to-date Ubuntu 10.10 using no special tools, so they do represent my user experience, (but may be influenced by my internal black mind) So what about launch times for the browsers, after a fresh boot:

1. Chromium: 1 sec
2. MineFire: 2.0 secs
3. FireFox: 2.1 secs
4. Opera: 2.7 secs

Chromium is the fastest launching browser out there. It launches really quick and time is around 1 second. FireFox made a huge step here and the start up time is close to 2 secsonds which is still a very good result. However Opera takes almost 3 seconds to launch and the difference from 2 seconds to 3…that’s some step and it gives the user start to feel he is waiting.

The integration into Ubuntu is the same for all tested browsers. Chromium and Opera feel like aliens in Ubuntu. Out-of-the-box Chromium does not look very good on Ubuntu, but using the available themes you can make it look integrated into Ubuntu. I personally don’t like the Opera interface, even though the menu is hidden behind the Opera button, there are buttons on top, left and the bottom. The firefox interface does already look good right now, and you can minimize the Menu (Views->Toolbars->Show Menu) so you get more space for the browser space. Firefox with the Ubuntu theme (which will surely not long to be updated) will look even better in Ubuntu.

One Bar for Chromium and still two bars for Firefox and Opera, where mainly only one is used to. Firefox and Opera also are redirected to google, bing…if nothing is found for what you entered in the url bar. So that makes the extra search field unnecessary(Kind of).

Extensions and Addons are available plenty for Chromium and Firefox, but Opera with only about 450 official extensions lacks some. Chromium now has WebApps, kind of applications running in the browser. Most of them are just links to a website, but some like TweetDeck, SourceKit and PingPong 3d are just few examples of what is possible.

Memory usage and CPU time of the browsers are as following for opening 3 tabs and 1 HD youtube video running, the RAM usage:

1. Opera: 357MB
2. Chromium: 404MB  (2 processes)
3. Firefox: 469MB

With the tabs open, but idle (no video playing or downloading) all browsers have around 1-2% CPU usage. When performing the Peacekeeper test the CPU goes up, but stays for all of them on a reasonable level, results are as following:

1. Opera: ~70-85%
2. Firefox: 50-99%
3. Chromium: 50-100%

Finally, I am happy to see that all browsers keep on improving and Firefox 4 will definitely be a new excellent browser on the market, whereas I think that Chromium is the best available browser on the market right now. Chromium now has the AdBlock extensions, that a lot of people missed in Chrome universe. I will continue to use Chromium as my main browser, especially since I started using tweetdeck in the browser. Chromium gives Desktop notifications integrated into Ubuntu notify-osd for GMail(Chat) and Tweetdeck which is a great new feature I use everyday. (Enable Notifications for GMail under Gmail->Settings->Enable Notifications)

Just Write

‘Just Write’ is a feature to extend the editor to the browser size, so blog posting does not feel anymore like filling out a form online, but is a lot more comfortable. It can be turn on and off with just a simple click.

'Just Write' on WordPress 3.1

‘Admin Navigation Bar’

When logged in and visiting your blog there is a top navigation bar with the main functionalities you can access straight from your blog without going first to the dashboard.

New Admin Navigation Bar

‘Internal Links’

Finally WordPress comes up wit a nice solution for Internal links. To insert an internal link into a post does not longer require that you leave the browser tab, go to your own blog, search for the post you want and copy the url. But clicking on the link in the post editor lets you search your own posts and pages to insert as link.

Internal Links