Linux

Bad nautilus, bad !

top - 19:59:18 up  8:24,  4 users,  load average: 8.82, 4.84, 1.97
Tasks: 182 total,   1 running, 181 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  5.6%us,  3.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 22.4%id, 67.6%wa,  0.3%hi,  0.6%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1025288k total,  1008708k used,    16580k free,     3204k buffers
Swap:  1546572k total,    12976k used,  1533596k free,   545744k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
 2517 kristof   20   0  115m  29m  14m S 9999  3.0   1:14.27 nautilus           
 5778 kristof   20   0  8768 1472 1056 D   15  0.1   0:01.99 unrar              
 1576 root      20   0  111m  42m 6908 S    1  4.3  15:55.08 Xorg               
   33 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    1  0.0   0:08.93 kswapd0 

There has been a lot of writing about the performance impact of Intel based graphical cards under Linux since the rewrite of the kernel driver, up to the point that it's becoming almost impossible to find a decent configuration, especially after some upgrades of your favorite distribution in terms of kernel and x.org. I found 3 modifications in my xorg.conf file which were causing really bad performance on my eeePC. After cleanup, I found myself with the following configuration, which gives me satisfactoring performance :

Section "Device"
	Identifier "Configured Video Device"
	Option "EXAOptimizeMigration" "true"
	Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
EndSection

Trick is not the be using UXA or tiling, which might be a cause of the performance hit.

Nowadays, new Linux kernel releases are just numbered with 2.6.x, independent of the features being added. This version numbering might indicate that there's no jump in added functionality, but the last Linux kernel releases have brought us significant new features. 2.6.28 brought us ext4, but 2.6.30 promises lots of goodies. This h-online.com article pretty much sums up all new features in this recently released 2.6.30 Linux kernel.

Memorable dates : it must be 10 years now since I ditched Windows95, and started using Linux exclusively on my home computer. I actually installed Linux mid 96, but it took another 2 years for XFree to support my SiS video card for more than 640x480x50Hz, and for KDE to offer a nice enjoyable desktop environment.

A Dropbox client for Linux has been released.
Unfortunately, the binary is released as a Nautilus plugin, which means that every user on your computer will be forced to register on Dropbox after logging in. (there's even no "Cancel" button on the registration window).

Oracle.com has two interesting pages online (part 1, part2) explaining some sophisticated commands that you will find extremely useful. The --reference option on chmod, the 'stat' and 'skill' commands are as handy as a Swiss knife in though sysadmin times...

Software RAID5 in Linux with mdadm is a great way to gain massive amounts of disk space which are required for storing digital media, with the added security of data redundancy incase one of the disks in the array fail. Many people will point out that software RAID5 performance is horrible, but as the article points out, with multicore CPU's there is little point in offloading such a ’small’ task. (Note : home use here, wouldn't run a 300GB database on this, off course).

Eye candy galore : 5 Mac OSX docks for Ubuntu and other distro's.

What I learned from setting up ZFS on my fileserver is an interesting look on the possibilities of different filesystems on differents OS'es, including OpenSolaris, BSD and Linux. Quite a different view from the ZFS. Respect article, which literally says "My personal opinion is that filesystems on Linux suck.".

My own opinion for file systems for home use : LVM and mdadm are sufficient, but YMMV off course.

andLinux is a complete Ubuntu system capable of running Linux apps natively on windows. It uses the coLinux Windows compiled Linux kernel to achieve this, and you can install more applications with aptitude. I can imagine situations where I would like to use this.