PocketWIFI and CentOS-6

Now that I have a laptop I can use on the train I can surf the internet using my Pocket WIFI. This is actually a Vodafone Hauwai E585 with a TPG SIM (Uses the Optus network).
It all works great but I don't get any feedback on the connection status and quality.
I have an app on my phone which does this but I could not find one for Linux so I decided to write one for Linux/Gnome.
Here then is my pocketwifi status applet.
 http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/pocketwifi-1.0-1.el6.noarch.rpm

1. Install the RPM
2. Right click on your gnome panel
3. Select Add to Panel...
4. Type in PocketWIFI
5. Click Add

The applet will automatically detect your route and find the PocketWIFI. It will then query the connection details and download the same status icons which are used on the PocketWIFI screen.

In the future I might add the option to use Gnome icons for  a more consistent look.I might also add support for some other models. If you want your model supported you can drop me an email.

FIPS integrity verification test failed.

After installing the updates for CentOS-6.6, my box started showing this warning when I run ssh:

FIPS integrity verification test failed.

I did not enable FIPS and don't much want it.
There are two ways to turn FIPS off. First option is to remove /etc/system-fips
rm -f /etc/system-fips
Second is to uninstall dracut-fips (which is the package which owns /etc/system-fips).
rpm --erase dracut-fips
The down side of this is that the package might come back. Something obviously caused it to be installed in the first place though I don't know what. There don't seem to be any rpm dependencies.

Eclipse software install error

I recently had the need to use Eclipse. I am not a fan and when I got this error while trying to install Eclipse plugin:

“Comparison method violates its general contract!”

my opinion was cemented.

The workaround is to use an old version of java like this:

eclipse -vm /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_45/bin/java


And the plugins, well they did not do much for me either.