For years, despite that computers’ speed increased in leaps and bounds, their start-up times slowly degraded; from near instant-on of early 8-bit systems to long minutes of crapware-laden, cheap XP laptops. Fortunately, this trend has been reversed lately; Ubuntu Lucid, while not offering anything to write home about by itself, boots consistently fast in about 10-30 seconds on most of the hardware I had the pleasure to test it on.
Today, while testing new display drivers, I found out that new X.org coupled with a newer kernel, both prepackaged courtesy of xorg-edgers staff, cut the system start-up time considerably, by 3 to 5 times, from quick but not great 10-15 sec down to very consistent 3 seconds of grub-to-gdm time.
Of course, it must be noted that this particular system is backed by an SSD, which adds helps shave a lot of loading time that normally is spent on spinning platters. On the other hand, this is exactly the same hardware the previous combination ran, so there is no difference in hardware capabilities here.
With Lucid (or 10.04) Ubuntu now ships with Kerberos 5 version 1.8 which, by default, blocks DES encryption. While it is laudable, as DES certainly is weak by today’s standards, it unfortunately breaks AFS in it’s current form. To get it working, you need to modify /etc/krb5.conf:
[libdefaults] allow_weak_crypto = true
For last two hours I was battling with fresh installation of Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop: for some strange reason radeonhd driver was switching video output to some non-existant connector on my video card, leaving me with a blank screen. Additionally, since this particular card pretty much requires effective power management (it is, putting it bluntly, noisy as hell), the resolution was obvious: install fglrx.
But how?
After several more or less failed attempts to do it the “old” way, booting into rescue and apt-getting fglrx in console, I finally gave up and used the “easy” way: boot into failsafe graphics mode and use the “Drivers” administrative tool. Worked like a charm.
Couldn’t be simpler — for a Windows user. Not for me, unfortunately.
Compared to previous versions, connecting to the internet via a Bluetooth enabled smartphone is incredibly easy: simply tick the checkbox next to “Use this device to connect to the Internet” when pairing your device, and then, in Network Manager, your phone will appear as a new network adaptor.
Caveat: Network-Manager might have a preference against Bluetooth PAN so high that the connection does not show at all in the drop-down list as long as any other option is present.
I just found a piece of paper with a “magic incantation” on it: a set of parameters for mkfs.xfs and mount that make Linux XFS go fast.. I remember spending a few days reading various documents and experimenting time after time to arrive at this, but unfortunately all that knowledge and pretty numbers are now lost.
Still, the effect is here, and that’s what counts, isn’t it?
mkfs.xfs -l size=128m,version=2 -d agsize=4g mount -o inode64,largeio,logbufs=8,logbsize=256k,noatime,nodiratime
Edit: I just caught a typo in the above: logbsize option was specified wrong.
Just a quick note to self that could be useful for others as well:
When updating Ubuntu or Debian packages with AMD (former ATI)’s binary driver, especially from version included in distribution to revision downloaded from the AMD website, always purge all fglrx* and libamdxvba* packages.
Not removing them will result in weird problems, starting from non-functional driver, ending with hardware lock-ups…
For years, I considered blogging curious and incomprehenshible activity, something just as strange to me as rice engraving; something that I could perhaps take a mildly curious gander at, nod and produce appreciative sound or two, then move on. Oh, I had an account on Livejournal, with mandatory two entries spaced almost exactly a year apart, but that account was primarily there to access my friends’ logs, whenever they asked me to take a loook at their posts.
My approach to weblogs didn’t change much thorough that time; perhaps frequently visiting news sites built around the concept of a blog, my standoffish approach to that very idea mellowed down, but not until maybe a year ago, I would consider a personal blog something useful, both to the person owning it and general populace. That changed after I started experimenting with new, less known technologies and software at work, mostly puppet and nginx, and found out that the best documentation, best solutions to problems I have encountered, were usually found at someone’s blog.
Over last few months, I felt the growing need to start my own weblog, to both share non trivial but not earth shattering finds, in hope to make someone’s life just a little bit less busy, but also exercise my public writing a little bit. I have been resisting these urges mainly on the grounds of simple lack of material to use, topics to write; I did not want to pollute the Web with just another unmaintained blog with one post per year and ton of comment spam.
My recent experiences at work, showing the value of archiving those small, simple solutions to rarely encountered problems, combined with my growing desire to branch out to AI game programming as well as training and morale boost that studying English philology brought to me finally removed that last mental barrier.
And so, it begins, for better or worse, my foray into blogging.