Wed, 20 Sep 2006
Boot Time As New Benchmark for Desktops
Since I have "switched" to OS X until
Ubuntu patches their kernel for some of
my laptop's hardware, I have noticed one thing above all in the performance
arena. OS X's boot time is un-fucking-believable. This is compared to Ubuntu
6's boot time on the same laptop.
Booting has been a
big topic of
discussion lately. It seems that the "overall
desktop experience" now depends on it. OS X must be doing some kind of
on-demand init thing
because the system gets from the bootloader to a login screen in
literally 5 seconds.
My second favorite OS X boot feature is unattended suspend
to RAM. I have to remove the battery often since the serial number is under it.
I rarely turn the laptop off so I'm pulling it's last bit of power when I do
this. Somehow someway, OS X knows to take that last bit of power, throw the
contents of RAM onto the disk and power down. The laptop needs a cold boot but
when it gets to the OS X loader, it will notice this little collection of RAM
on the disk and throw it back into RAM. The results are the screen and programs
are exactly where I left off.
Pimping OS X sucks. Unfortunatley, these kinds of power management issues are a
constant problem with the Linux kernel on some kinds of hardware.
posted at: 17:18 | path:
/debian |
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Mon, 24 Jul 2006
Libpam 0.79-3 in Sid
So it's official. I can run Debian on the desktop again! The one thing holding
me back was
libpam
in sarge. Then I upgraded to Etch but it still couldn't give realtime priority
to a user. So I installed Ubuntu Dapper and it did. JACK applications would run
smoothly. But despite it's fabulosity in popular culture, I don't really like
the superficiallity of Ubuntu. Debian with chrome rims, basically.
When the Macbook gets shipped back I'm dual booting Sid and OS X. Yeah!
posted at: 17:24 | path:
/debian |
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Thu, 13 Jul 2006
Ubuntu has an old nmap
OS fingerprinting is one of the cooler parts of nmap. Unfortunately, it appears
that these fingerprints change as vendors release OS updates. Today, nmap
identified a Macbook Pro running 10.4.7 as running 10.3. Another good reason to
build network security packages from source.
posted at: 14:18 | path:
/debian |
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Sun, 26 Mar 2006
I was wrong. The Etch kernel is awesome.
Sike! But my
previous
post about the broken prism2_cs driver was wrong, the
Linksys WCF12 I own works "out of the box", it just needs manual configuration
via weird
iwconfig options. Namely, changing the mode from Master to Managed.
posted at: 17:58 | path:
/debian |
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Tue, 14 Mar 2006
Jack...the project that will never agree on anything
My recent foray into an upgraded jackd configuration with a USB sound card shows that the
project still cannot figure out a way to interface with the kernel developers
to get realtime priority support into the vanilla sources. Jackd
always...always ends at compiling kernel level stuff, which takes hours of
trial, error and bug reporting. Everyone has their own special way of getting
it to "just work" and none ever do. Fuck! Get realtime-lsm into the kernel
source!
posted at: 12:19 | path:
/debian |
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Darkice and Lame on Etch
More time to kill while I'm waiting for some info on the
m-a bug. Installing
the lame libs from
Marillat's apt
repo, the darkice source from sid and
rebuilding for etch with mp3 support went fine after editing out --without-lame
from debian/rules. That's nice. Next stop are the
seemingly broken prism2_cs drivers in 2.6.15. I think I'll rebuild the
kernel...yet...again...on this laptop. This is begining to be almost as fun as
running Windows.
posted at: 00:30 | path:
/debian |
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Mon, 13 Mar 2006
Etch and kernels and audio == poop
I upgraded the laptop to
Debian testing, aka etch.
Big things like
x.org and
udev went fine. The USB sound card works by default with ALSA. Yea. But jackd
stands true as the complicated, difficult "professional" package and will not configure. I've hit the Debian BTS once again, despite some LAU email
list users describing the upgrade as "easy" and giving me the advice to "stop
waiting to upgrade to etch."
For the record, the 2.6.15-1-686 kernel does not work with module-assistant
0.10.2 in etch. I cannot rebuild the realtime-lsm-source module because m-a
complains the kernel headers are unconfigured. So I install the kernel source
and run menuconfig. Same complaint.
Bug, Bug!
posted at: 23:49 | path:
/debian |
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Tue, 14 Feb 2006
Zimbra Debian Sarge Port
It looks like the
YES Linux maintainer has ported Zimbra to Debian and
documented
the process on Zimbra's forums. I'll be following this and compare
notes.
posted at: 17:08 | path:
/debian |
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Mon, 13 Feb 2006
Zimbra Dependencies for Debian
It seems that the Debian package dependencies for Zimbra are
pretty thin. This implies that
one can only install the zimbra-core package and use evreything else that's in
the stable release. This makes Zimbra much less likely to take over your
system.
posted at: 02:09 | path:
/debian |
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The Zimbra Collaboration Suite
WTF!? An open source MS Exchange server! This is impossible.
Well, not really. Many of us have been doing it for quite some time through
various open source packages like apache, postfix, cyrus-imapd, openldap, yada,
yada, yada. But that's hard. The topic of many a Linux Journal articles. So I
find out about this thing called Zimbra from LUG Radio and download the Debian
packages. These are my first impressions.
WTF!?!
In case you didn't hear that...
WTF!?!
It's cool. Really cool. But also really wack at the same time. This is the list
of all the files
Zimbra installs but be warned,
just the list of files weighs in at 1.3 megs!posted at: 01:35 | path:
/debian |
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