I will attend UMUC (University of Maryland University College) this coming Fall and decided to take a free online course called UMUC 411 to prepare my laptop for the upcoming class. This online class officially starts on next Monday, but I finished lectures and completed the first assignment today. While I was using the WebTycho (the UMUC online classroom management system), I had some problems with my Ubuntu laptop.
WebTycho does not seem to support Chromium so I switched back to Firefox. After I logged in, it states that it uses Real format as the default playback format for the audios and videos. I don’t want to install Linux version of the Real Player since it’s not open. I thought that there must be a Firefox plugin to play the Real file format in the Synaptic Package Manager. After some search in the manager, I found a package called gecko-mediaplayer and installed it. Based on its description, it is a browser plugin that uses MPlayer and NS4 API to stream the media inside the browsers. I reopened Firefox and noticed that there is a video after I logged in. I think that the video did not appear before is because there was no Real plugin installed. The Real media plays very well inside MPlayer.
In addition to Real, WebTycho also uses Java for some of its applications. The problem with Java is that the Java process always runs in the background until Firefox was closed. This means that once I logged in WebTycho, Java process started even I didn’t use a Java application. For some reason, Java installed on Ubuntu uses greater CPU power than Firefox. It makes very loud noise from my laptop’s fans. I don’t like noise like this, so I searched across the web to find a way to disable Java in Firefox 3. Unfortunately, the methods I found either applies to Firefox 1.5/2 or Windows version of Firefox 3. I then played around with System Monitor to see if I can get something from it. I happened to be found a solution to the problem by right-clicking the Java process in the System Monitor and chose Open Files. It lists all the files that are currently opened by Java program. I noticed that IcedTea are mentioned in the list and I thought this probably correspondence to one of the Firefox plugins. After I reopened Firefox once more and disabled this plugin, Java is no longer activate automatically. Fortunately, Firefox plugins can be enabled/disabled on the fly without restart the browser, I can enable it whenever I use a Java-based app.
