Entries Tagged 'Linux' ↓

If you’re using Ubuntu on your laptop, do the following:

Go to “*System > Administration > Services*” in your menubar, and then enable “*Hard disk tuning*”.

Then (and this is just a bit more complex, but not very), type “*Alt + F2*” to bring up your “*Run Application*” dialog box, and type in “*sudo gedit /etc/hdparm.conf*”.

Then, scroll all the way to the bottom, and type in:

/dev/sda {
apm = 254
}

Save the file and then restart your computer. That is all.

[ "Source":https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695 ]

Well, there’s a new addition to my family of computers — it’s my wife’s new portable laptop, Henry. (You just _always_ have to name computers — if you don’t, it’s bad luck! Kinda like with ships.)

!http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1157/1342842965_7bb70e7705_m.jpg!

Nina needed a slightly smaller laptop so that she could sometimes bring it to school — eh, who am I kidding? _Slightly_ smaller? No insult meant to the laptops we already had, but I’m firmly convinced that they were never meant to be portable — just _smaller_ than desktops. My personal laptop and hers are 15-in *8 lbs.* _monsters_, from about four or five years ago.

Now, this nice model (the Compaq Evo N410c), is from that era too, but for its time it was made with a completely different paradigm — it’s only 0.9 inches thick, weighs slightly less than 3.5 lbs, and is only 12 inches, diagonally.

…and I got it all, used, on “Ebay”:http://ebay.com, for less than what people pay for iPods.

…_used_ iPods.

We’re running “Ubuntu 7.04″:http://ubuntu.com on there right now, with all the bells, whistles, and fancy effects, and it’s more than capable of running it (3D-emulation worked right away). Not only that, but the installation was slick as shit, too — I’ve never had one run more smoothly than it did with Henry. Even the bonus wireless card that the seller included (one with a Prism GT chipset) worked right away, with absolutely no tweaking needed whatsoever…

The battery seems to be quite old, though (laptop batteries _never_ last very long), so I’ve ordered a new one that should be here soon.

I’ve been fiddling with my cars lately, too, in various efforts to fix them and tune them up.

The Beetle was brought to Montgomery in the guise of performing a break-light switch recall, and whilst it was there, I told them about a “funny vibration” we had been hearing for a while — I cringed the entire time I did this, knowing that, if it turned out to be something under warranty, the examination cost (about $70) would be covered, but if it wasn’t covered under the warranty, I had to fork over the dough.

Well, turned out the noise, which I had been thinking was an exhaust leak and malfunction, turned out to be a rear wheel bearing that was slowly wearing out — oops (it was my second guess, to tell you the truth). However, it’s covered under the warranty! Yeah!

My other cars have not faired so well. Ever since doing an oil change on my white Mustang (and disconnecting the battery so that I could clean off the terminals), it’s been shutting off at weird times and sometimes refusing to start up at all. I actually got a chance to check around the engine compartment today, and during the course of my examination, I decided to pull one of the spark plug boots off (just to take a random look)… and the spark plug boot fell apart in my hand, with most of it still remaining on the spark plug.

Yeah… I don’t know if that’s what had been originally causing my problem, but I’m sure it doesn’t help.

My purple Mustang has been having problems of its own, as well. It’s been “pinging” (a sound caused by ill-timed detonation of the fuel inside the cylinder) for a while now, but it’s gotten worse. I bought a “timing gun”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_light about a year ago with the intention of fixing the timing on my purple Mustang (if it needed it), but I couldn’t figure out how to use it with my car (the front engine compartment is very, _very_ cramped).

Well, today, a year’s gone past, and I’ve since figured out how — by moving my upper radiator hose two inches to the left.

That’s it. Why the hell couldn’t I have figured that out sooner?!? Now, to figure out what the hell I’m looking at and how to fix it!

Currently in the process of doing this:

“Recovering Ubuntu”:https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

for my brother-in-law. Not because anything went wrong, per se — it’s just that we installed Ubuntu on a drive that was too small for our liking (12GiB) and needed to “move” the entire installation to a bigger disk (20GiB).

Yeah, lazy, eh? Anybody else would just wipe everything and reinstall, but I used the handy-dandy “PartedMagic Boot CD”:http://partedmagic.com/ to just “move” the entire installation of Ubuntu onto the bigger drive.

It’s all worked out fine except that now I’m having to reconstruct the boot sector by hand, which isn’t too hard, _if_ I knew completely what I was doing!

Well, this morning I decided to move around my partition tables on our main gaming computer — yeah, I know, silly idea, right?

“Why do you keep fucking around with stuff if it’s working fine?”

Because if I didn’t, I’d never learn anything new, would I?
Anyway… I moved around the partition tables (I wanted to make one partition bigger), and all of a sudden Ubuntu wouldn’t boot correctly anymore.

I mean, it _worked_, but it would hang during boot and give me a terminal screen. At this point, I could safely press Ctrl-D to continue the boot process, and everything would be fine. Annoying, but workable, I guess… but I want to know how to fix it.

So, I notice it’s hanging on something called “fsck” during the boot process (some kind of disk management utility for Linux), so I google it along with the word “Ubuntu,” and it leads me to this page:

“fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve”:https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/e2fsprogs/+bug/66032

Turns out that in your “/etc/fstab” file in your Linux installation are a collection of entries regarding which boot partitions will be loaded at boot time, and there was an old entry for the drive that I had resized (I had actually deleted it and created a bigger one, now that I think about it).

I just commented out the line (with a “#” character) that referred to the old drive that I had deleted, and whatta-you-know… it works. No more dumping to the terminal screen during boot.

Now, the partition manager I used is called “Parted Magic”:http://partedmagic.com/ — it’s a great little application that comes in the form of a bootable CD (by way of .ISO file). It’s got an amazing GUI-based interface (looks like it’s based a bit on “KDE”:http://www.kde.org), and is easy as crap to use, trust me. It runs amazingly fast and has booted fine on every computer I’ve tried. Try it!

“No negotiations with Microsoft in progress — MarkShuttleworth.com”:http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/127

Give ‘em hell, Mark.

I like the way he approaches this from a business standpoint, too, and not just one of “Microsoft Bad — No Deals with Them!”

“Dell.com/Open”:http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

If you can do without a monitor, you can get the E520 model for only 400 bucks. Great if you’re needing another computer right now!

For what you’re getting at that price (1.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 1 Gb RAM, 250 Gb of hard drive space), it’s a farking steal. Plus, you’re supporting the open source community with your purchase.

Now, don’t go out and buy one if you can’t afford it (duh), but if you’re in the market for a new computer, check it out.

Thank farking Christ-almighty — I _finally_ got Beryl working with Ubuntu on the Titan! And let me tell you… it looks *great*. I’ve been playing around with these effects on our older computers (which were luckily running nVidia cards), and they worked, but they weren’t as fast as _this_…

For the past few months, trying to get it to work has been a _major_ pain in the ass — nothing seemed to work. Of course, I haven’t been the only one with this problem — practically anyone else trying to get any kind of advanced 3D effect to work in Linux with an “ATI”:http://www.ati.com card has been faced with the same difficulties. It all stems from ATI’s poor support of Linux when it comes to video drivers — they release one, but it hardly works.

Well, either they’ve released a new version, or the programmers at “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com have done some tweaking with their new version (7.04), because it works now! “This tutorial”:http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Install_Beryl_on_Ubuntu_Feisty_with_XGL was a great help — pay close attention to the instructions on how to _downgrade_ the beryl-core to a version that’s released directly from the Beryl group. It turns out the version that’s included with Ubuntu is a wee bit buggy.

Hey, nobody’s perfect.

Take a look:

!http://threshold-zero.tmanime.com/images/4t.png!:http://threshold-zero.tmanime.com/images/4.png

Notice that? Wow, support for Linux! Now, on your Dell Laptop when you go for support, you can actually choose Linux from the list of available operating systems to get help with! Yay!

But look more closely at the results that it’s given you as available downloads… notice the BIOS updater program? Guess what form you get that in?

A windows executable.

Yeah, Dell is pulling a lot of this “oh look by the way we support linux now too hurr hurr” stuff just to piss of Microsoft. The word “on the street” is that OEM manufacturers do this stuff every few years in order to make sure Microsoft doesn’t try and charge too much for the versions of Windows that companies like Dell pre-install on computers for you.

Take a look at this:

“Even Michael S. Dell uses Ubuntu Linux at home!”:http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/biographies/en/msd_computers?c=us&l=en&s=corp

See what I mean? Oh noes! Even the leader of Dell uses Linux! Watch out, Microsoft!

While I would love to see Dell adopting big time support for Linux, it just ain’t gonna happen. They’ve pulled this stuff before, and then when they’re pressured by Microsoft, they back down.

After months of trying to learn out how, I’ve finally mastered the cpulimit library for linux! I learned about it many months ago while looking at add-ons for the “http://boinc.berkeley.edu/”:BOINC distributed computing project. You see, I needed a way to limit the amount of CPU power that BOINC used when it ran its computations — this is mainly so I can run it at work!

My computer at work is a fairly modern Intel system, so it has all sorts of fans and magic-step-up temperature controls and whatnot, and everytime I start doing anything even _remotely_ CPU-intensive, this case fan at the front of my desktop starts spinning faster, and faster, and faster, until it sounds like there’s a jet engine inside my cubicle!

Well, this just certainly won’t do. I’d love to use the idle computing power of my work PC (which is just being absolutely _wasted_ by me doing nothing but programming on it), but I can’t have somebody eventually getting suspicious because of the racket coming from my PC.

In steps the cpulimiter library. This handy dandy little _whatever_ (”process,” I guess) will only allow a process to use a limited amount of CPU power from within linux (did I mention I’m doing all of this inside of a virtual machine?). It wasn’t included with the “http://www.ubuntu.com”:Ubuntu 6.06 virtual machine I use at work, so I actually had to download the source and compile it myself! Yay! You betcha — it didn’t work at all!

The virtual machine version of Ubuntu was missing the _make_ compiler, not to mention the necessary C and C++ libraries necessary to do the compiliation. I managed to get the stuff I needed after just randomly downloading important looking libraries from the Synaptic Package Manager, and eventually got it compiled!

Now, I’m free to run BOINC on my work PC (which is actually pretty damn fast) whenever I choose. The Intel chip in my PC runs pretty damn hot no matter what (idle temperature is around 55° C!), but at least it’s not noisy.

[_Transcribed from my work blog_]

For the past few months on my work computer (and even longer on my home computer) I’ve noticed that my web browsing via Firefox has slowed to an absolute crawl. Firefox would take almost 45 seconds just to load up, and each page loaded with the horrifying speed of glass (which is actually an extremely viscous liquid — ha ha, science! *thrusts finger in air*).

I realized right away that this wasn’t Firefox’s fault. Why? Because I’d use other peoples’ computers with Firefox, and their copies loaded quickly, browsed quickly, and rendered quickly…

That left only one thing, right? It was an extension slowing me down. But which one?

I figured it was one of two — either NoScript or Adblock.

Now, Adblock used to slow me down until I figured out my tried-and-true-two-entries-only-blocking-list:

/[^A-Za-z0-9]ad[s]?[^A-Za-z0-9]/

/(2o7|a\d\.yimg|ad(brite|click|farm|revolver|server|tech|vert)|
at(dmt|wola)|banner|bizrate|blogads|bluestreak|burstnet|casalemedia|
coremetrics|(double|fast)click|falkag|(feedster|right)media|
googlesyndication|hitbox|httpads|imiclk|intellitxt|js\.overture|kanoodle|
mediaplex|nextag|pointroll|qksrv|speedera|statcounter|tribalfusion|
webtrends)(\d+[x]\d+)?/

These two lines stop almost all banner ads of any sort, and it’s easy for the Adblock engine to parse. The problem of a huge Adblock-list plagued me some time ago, but after replacing my enormous block list with these two lines, the problem went away.

Now about a year or so later, the problem has arisen once again, and this left only one possible answer: NoScript.

You would think so, eh? Turns out it wasn’t that easy. I’ve installed Firefox on new computers and added NoScript, and it ran with no problems — fast as can be. Then what was wrong with my installation, specifically?

Well, what was the difference between a NoScript installation on a new computer and my main NoScript installation?

My banned/allowed scripts list, of course. My *five-thousand-line-long banned/allowed scripts list.*

If you’re picky like me, you don’t like having ad farms deliver content to you. You don’t like being the target of “customer-orientated advertising campaigns,” you don’t like having “relevant marketing content” delivered to you, and you definitely don’t like being the source of “valid consumer visitation information” for companies. You like buying the things that you want to buy, not things that you’ve been subtly prodded into buying. (Trust me — just go to Tacoda.net and look at some of their “consumer profiles.” You’re not a person to these organizations — you’re not even a group of people. You’re just a line in a database somewhere.)

I stop almost every single bit of JavaScript that runs in my browser when I’m web-surfing, except for whatever’s coming from the main site that I’m visiting. (Trust me, I program JavaScript as a career. I know what it can do, and I don’t want it doing it!) Well, over time, my “blocked/allowed domains” list in NoScript had become very, very, very large. And everytime I started up Firefox or tried to load a new page, NoScript was having to check each and every bit of JavaScript against that enormous list… even clicking on the NoScript context menu to bring it up was starting to take a full *three seconds.*

So, what do you do? Well, it seems the makers of NoScript must have come across this problem, because they’ve included a feature to always allow JavaScript from whatever domain you’re currently visiting — this is something I always allow anyway, since the main culprits of JavaScript-delivered ad-farming are almost always off-site domains (tacoda.net, doubleclick.net, etc.). You’re pretty safe in always allowing the domain you’re visiting to run JavaScript on your computer.

I turned on this option, but I still had to get rid of that giant permissions list, now didn’t I? You can do that from within the NoScript control panel, but my list was so large that every time I tried to remove the entire thing, Firefox would lock up. Poor thing…
I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the extension… to no avail. Unfortunately, Firefox keeps the settings of whatever extensions you’ve installed. (There really should be an option to stop that!)

I wasn’t going to re-install Firefox, so what now? Well, on NoScript’s site, they talk about this exact thing:

_If you want to erase your whitelist you can either use the NoScript Options user interface (recommended option) or remove from the aforementioned prefs.js all the preference entries whose name starts with ‘capability.policy.maonoscript’._

The prefs.js file seems to be a collection of items in some sort of array, and the particular entry for NoScript was disgusting huge. So, I uninstalled NoScript first (just to make sure I wasn’t editing its prefs.js section while it was installed), took out the relevant lines from prefs.js, and turned on the “allow top-level sites” option.

Ah… browsing revisited. Running NoScript in this fashion — allowing all top-level JavaScript and only banning off-site scripts — is so much more efficient.