Justin Conover’s Blog

Its nice to be in OpenSolaris again, just something about it seems refreshing and sturdy.

I also don’t blog much now-a-days with facebook and twitter…

Found this link and needed to add some stuff from the comments.

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/03/24/disable-synaptics-touchpad/

$ sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier      “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver          “synaptics”
Option        ”CorePointer”
Option          “SendCoreEvents”        “true”
Option          “Device”                “/dev/psaux”
Option          “Protocol”              “auto-dev”
Option          “HorizScrollDelta”      “0″
Option          “SHMConfig”             “on”
EndSection

Now from a term I can run

$synclient TouchpadOff=1  (disables)

or

$synclient TouchpadOff=0 (enables)

Also added keyboard shortcuts in GNOME.  “gnome-keybinding-properties”

just click “ADD” give it a name like TouchpadOFF and TouchpadON but the commands above and after that choose your key combo, I’m using ctrl+m and alt+m

So I’ve been running Ubuntu since Warty was Alpha and started liking it but I still ran Fedora and had ran every version of Fedora/Red Hat since it was Red hat 7.1.  I finally stopped using Fedora around 9 and had Ubuntu pretty much on everything.

Things I like about Ubuntu.

1.)  dpkg/apt-get  - No I’m not going to say rpm/yum is dependency hell, that argument hasn’t worked for over 5 years and I don’t know why people still say it…  Something about dpkg and the frontend of apt-get/aptitude seems more elegant, faster.

2.)  repository - really nothing come close, release day everything is there.

3.)  stable - not that Fedora isn’t because it is, thats just a nice feature of most Linux distros.

4.)  community - forums and irc, people seem to be happier and eager to help others more than most community’s.

5.)  documentation - tons of docs!!

6.)  You can remove pacakges with out tons of things or your whole desktop being removed too!!  However I will say I loaded up Fedora 11(still play with Fedora) and “yum remove evolution”, just for a test, nothing against evolution and it was only going to remove a few pacakges.  In the past, this would have probably taken all of GNOME with it….

7.)  Release upgrades - this is pretty painless in Debian systems.  RPM can do it too, just seems harder and not as succesfull as debian, plus there is the whole repository issue with packages in 3rd party repo’s not being ready on Fedora launch, Ubuntu they are ready.

8.)  PPA -  PPA’s rock, thats all I can say…

Some things I don’t like:

1.)  SELinux support is almost non existant.  I really like having as much security as I can

2.)   Fedora seems to stay ahead on package updates after a relase, Ubuntu doesn’t seem to upgrade unless it is a security fix.  Ubuntu has backports but I don’t think that compares to how much Fedora keeps the current stable release updated.

I don’t really blog much…. Facebook seems to be the easiest method now a days.

I found this link and thought I would share it.


Kernels 2.6.16 and newer provide a mechanism to have the kernel drop the page cache and/or inode and dentry caches on command, which can help free up a lot of memory. Now you can throw away that script that allocated a ton of memory just to get rid of the cache...

To use /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches, just echo a number to it.

To free pagecache:

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To free dentries and inodes:

# echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

To free pagecache, dentries and inodes:

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

As this is a non-destructive operation and dirty objects are not freeable, the user should run “sync” first!

So after awhile I was not impressed with running eeebuntu, it’s ok I just rather run default.   Here is what I did and used many other guides on the net with links at the bottom.

Asus eepc 1000
Ubuntu 8.10 i386

Install Ubuntu via the live cd option with the following partitions:

/        /dev/sda1    all ~7.4G
/usr/share    /dev/sdb1    4G
swap        /dev/sdb5    2G
/home        /dev/sdb6    rest ~24G

If you didn’t install it via the live cd, when it is finished, boot into the live cd.

turning off ordered data writing for the journal with

$ sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda1
$ sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdb1
$ sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdb6

Setup the array.org repos for a custom eee Kernel:

$ wget http://www.array.org/ubuntu/array-intrepid.list
$ sudo mv -v array-intrepid.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
$ wget http://www.array.org/ubuntu/array-apt-key.asc
$ sudo apt-key add array-apt-key.asc
$ sudo apt-get update

Install the EeePC-lean kernel.

$ sudo apt-get install linux-eeepc-lean linux-headers-eeepc-lean rt2860-dkms eeepc-config gsynaptics-elantech

$ sudo reboot

Make sure you select the eeepc kernel to boot into, press ESC at the grub prompt to select.

Remove the ubuntu generic kernels to keep them from updating.

$ sudo apt-get remove linux-generic linux-image-generic linux-restricted-modules-generic linux-headers-generic

You can remove all generic kernels giving you no fall back with:

$ sudo apt-get remove –purge linux-.*-generic
$ sudo apt-get autoremove
$ sudo apt-get remove –purge linux-headers-2.6.27-7

Enable laptop mode in acpi:

$ sudo vi /etc/default/acpi-support

ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true

$ sudo reboot

Tweaks:

1.) Using a ramdisk instead of the SSD to store temporary files will speed things up, but will cost you a few megabytes of RAM.

$ sudo vi /etc/fstab

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

2.) Firefox puts its cache in your home partition. By moving this cache in RAM you can speed up Firefox and reduce disk writes. Complete the previous tweak to mount /tmp in RAM, and you can put the cache there as well.

Open about:config in Firefox. Right click in an open area and create a new string value called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. Set the value to /tmp.

3.) Change I/O scheduler to noop

$ sudo vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

Add “elevator=noop” to the # kopt=root* line with a space between and no quotes. My line looks like this:

# kopt=root=UUID=04d9cdcb-6cb4-4d0b-a04e-bfabd4e436b1 ro elevator=noop

Default is cfq you can also try deadline or anticipatory

$ sudo update-grub

4.) Tell the system not to use the swap partition as swap, and it will be used for hibernation only.

$ sudo vi /etc/sysctl.conf

and add “vm.swappiness = 0″ at the end of the file.

5.) Encrypt a private directory

$ sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils
$ ecryptfs-setup-private

EXTRAS:

$ sudo apt-get install ssh nautilus-open-terminal xchat-gnome gnome-main-menu ubuntu-restricted-extras

Add medibuntu:

$ echo deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ intrepid free non-free | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
$ wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install w32codecs libdvdcss2 -y

Resources and thanks to:

http://www.array.org/ubuntu/

http://www.harald-hoyer.de/personal/blog/fedora-10-boot-analysis

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=49865

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-using-linux-with-solid-state-drives/

$ echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list && sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude upgrade

https://launchpad.net/~openoffice-pkgs/+archive

Testing it now on my eeepc 1000, I just had everything working on F10….

http://www.eeebuntu.org/

I’m not sure when it was released, but sometime in the last week is my guess and I did not dig around the site to long, doesn’t really matter, its out…

I really like the netbooks remix from Canonical.

That didn’t take long…. I’m back in Fedora, I did miss it… o_O

Thanks to Quasar8000 I have a nice little kernel 2.6.28 with the rt2860 wireless drivers from my eeePC 1000!

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=1132055&postcount=23

I’ll give some details on that little laptop sometime, I like it!

Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list

## kde updates testing
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu intrepid main

apt-get update

apt-get install kubuntu-desktop kubuntu-restricted-extras startupmanager

If you don’t like Kubuntu startup splash, change it back to default with startupmanager.

Over the years for the most part I’ve been using Gnome on Linux/Solaris/BSD and off/on play with E17 and KDE.  So thought I would dig into the latest kde for a bit.

If you want really bleeding edge kde you can also install kde-nightly on Ubuntu.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu intrepid main

sudo apt-get install kde-nightly

This will install to a different directory and in your home dir use .kde-nightly so you should be clean to have both.  Possible some packages might collide so your milage may very…