Fedora 9 Delay and the lack of 4:3 Thinkpads

So Fedora 9 is delayed by two weeks. This is disappointing news, but the extra polish will be welcome. I downloaded and installed the KDE 4 Live Pre-release (64 bit version), and it worked fairly well. NetworkManager works as good as before, if not better. KDE 4.0.3 is the desktop, and it is usable for me. A recent beta of Firefox 3 is available, and Perl 5.10.0 is the default version of Perl. The current artwork is also much better than the beta and alpha, and has the same quality in Fedora 8's artwork.

In other sad news, Lenovo has ceased offering the 14.1" standard display option for T61 Thinkpads. 14.1" and 15.4" standard screens for the R61 were discontinued a while back. This means that the only option for a 4:3 Thinkpad directly from Lenovo is the X61 or X61 tablet, both of which have 12.1" screens. X61 is only available in XGA (1024x768), which is unfortunate. The tablet is still offered with SXGA (1400x1050), but you can't have multitouch in that case. Hopefully Lenovo will find a way to offer some high resolution non-wide screens in 13.3" or 14.1". In the meantime, I'll continue looking for better ways to use the extra portion.

Update: It looks like the whole Thinkpad line will be updated soon (unconfirmed). It won't affect me for another two cycles of Moore's Law in any case, but it's still interesting.