Итак по свежим следам и для всех тех кто решит обновится до этой версии. Вас ждет ловушка!

Ссылка для Ъ.
Само обновление проходит гладко. Перезагружаемся и видим странные падения отдельных приложений… Судя по всему требуется revdep-rebuild Делаем revdep-rebuild и видим что пересборка во первых требуется для очень большого числа приложений а во вторых мрет на ошибке

/bin/grep: /usr/lib64/libGL.la: No such file or directory
/bin/sed: can't read /usr/lib64/libGL.la: No such file or directory
libtool: link: `/usr/lib64/libGL.la' is not a valid libtool archive

Небольшое расследование показывает что причина кроется в том, что согласно ChangeLog

06 Nov 2009; Doug Goldstein
+nvidia-drivers-190.42-r3.ebuild:
remove generation of libGL.la since eselect-opengl-1.0.9 and newer no
longer uses it. refactor installation of libraries to fix FreeBSD issues

Собственно само решение проблемы

emerge dev-util/lafilefixer
lafilefixer --justfixit
revdep-rebuild

Ну и спокойной ночи.

I wanted to install unix on Jamie’s new laptop for him. It is a wireless enabled notebook from Novatech with an AMD x64 processor.

I kept notes as I went along, unfortunately the windows box I was putting the notes on restarted, so the following is from memory.

The distros I tried were as follows:-

• freebsd 7.2 and 8 RC2,
• opensolaris 09 06
• centos 5.4,
• debian 5.03
• fedora 11
• gentoo 20091029
• knopix v6
• openSUSE 11.2 RC2
• PC-BSD 7.1.1
• Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10

The quick summary is that only a few of the distro’s installed at all, and almost all were unable to deal with the network card.  This is because the card driver is only available in the linux 9.   There is some info on the hardware and a how to at http://forum.novatech.co.uk/showthread.php?t=15068, but if it is your only machine you need to get networking set up before you can browse and find things.

The really bad

• Centos – install crashed can not remember why now
• Fedora – install crashed can not remember why now
• PC-BSD – install got to the point after configuring disks and the could not mount the CD, that it had used to boot off

Installed, but did not have network card driver

• Freebsd 7.2 – I was able to get an IP address that I could ping from another machine so probably me, could not get dhcp to work or to get it to look out at the world to download files
• opensolaris
• debian
• gentoo
• knopix
• openSUSE
• Ubuntu 9.04

Fully worked from install

• Free BSD 8 RC2
• Ubuntu 9.10

So the quick review of the various distros, starting with what worked and going downwards.

Working Distros

Ubuntu 9.10

This is definitely the easiest to install and use and just worked straight off, with a quick painless install.  There was a quick download of the wireless drive and make; make install, reboot and both wired and wireless networking were working perfectly.

This is what Jamie’s laptop is using.

Free BSD 8 RC2

Personally, I like the ugly text based BSD installs, because they work.  However they are a very long way behind Ubuntu if you are not a complete techi.

FreeBSD installed fine, DHCP worked with the wired network, and I was able to install everything from ports, apart from Open Office, which I downloaded.

Issues

• I love ports, but compiling and installing X11, Gnome2, etc takes a long time.
• Open office installed fine using the compiled version
• Java is a real pain – because of sun licencing

Java on Free BSD

I installed wget, because the Gnome2 browser was a bit iffy about where it tried to save files.  Which was a problem for the various things that wanted me to accept licence terms around “very evil SUN” java.  I had to download somethings onto the windows box and scp them over.

I also needed to edit the make files and filelist since things had changed since the port was created, and I was not able to find the tzupdate file that was in the port.

By this time I had found the Novatech howto for the wireless side of things, and decided that Ubuntu would be much, much easier for Jamie.

Did not Support network card

Free bsd 7.2, Gentoo, Debian

Card was required to work for rest of install so did not get much further, all fairly similar text based working installers

Knopix, Open Suse, Ubuntu 9.04

Nice graphical working installers, and OS installed fine.  Just did not have network support built into kernal.

OpenSolaris

First time I have tried openSolaris, and it was really good.  It has a nice set of hardware diagnostics, that worked.  Unfortunately it did not support the hardware, and I did not try compiling the drivers.

Network Manager issues

Goes mad if network card not supported same issue across all linux distros that did not support the card in the kernel.

Summary

Ubuntu, has a more up to date kernel at the point when the laptop was updated, and this made it the only distro to install out of the box.  Free BSD also had kernal support for the system, however there was significantly more work to make it work and it was not appropriate as a starting form of Unix.

emerge -av mysql
/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

finish

Po długiej przerwie postanowiłem napisać jakiś post, traktował on będzie o zestawie narzędzi pomocnych przy zarządzaniu ebuildami w Gentoo.

Po pierwsze nie mam zamiaru wyważać otwartych drzwi więc zamiast rozpisywać się o podstawowych możliwościach programów z portage-utils wstawię odnośnik do gentoo-docs: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/pl/portage-utils.xml.

Chciałbym dodać tylko jedną rzecz, której szukałem przez jakiś czas i właśnie ten pakiet to rozwiązał. Od czasu do czasu, porządkując system usuwałem programy, które instalowałem na próbę i więcej z nich nie korzystałem, niektóre były zależnościami innych programów (również nieużywanych) i miałem problemy z ich usuwaniem (podczas aktualizacji systemu były instalowane powtórnie jako zależności), musiałem uruchamiać aktualizację z opcją –tree i samemu szukać, oraz wywalać to co instalowało usuwany program jako zależność.

Aktualnie wykorzystuję program qdepends w tym celu. Komenda:

qdepends -Q pakiet

wyświetla programy, które mają pakiet w zależnościach, możemy teraz sprawdzić czy są nam potrzebne. Jeśli tak nie jest możemy wykonać komendę:

emerge -aC `qdepends -CNQ pakiet | tr ‘\n’ ‘ ‘`

która spowoduje usunięcie wszystkich programów zależnych od naszego pakietu (po uprzednim zapytaniu o  potwierdzenie usunięcia). Po takim zabiegu możemy usunąć pakiet i nie powinien już automatycznie instalować przy aktualizacji.

I loathe weak human cattle. I detest fawning sycophants who squirm and grovel at the feet of their masters, singing the praises of those who make their lives a misery. And I vomit upon all those pathetic drones who just do as they’re told, never seeking a better way, and worship anything they see as greater than themselves, which is basically everything.

I like rebels. I respect warrior-poets who value intelligence and the search for knowledge as much as they do bloodshed. I admire those who have the strength and determination to forever banish their false gods, and even to battle against them vigilantly. I vigorously cheer those who accept the calling to free heathens from the bonds of ignorance, and shout a hearty “Hail!” to those who manage to survive the ordeal of breaking away from their miserable pasts!

We all know of one opposition to the evil Microsoft Empire and its false god WinDOH!s, the Macosians, but they are laughably small in number, hidden away in offices and basements, and mostly comprised of artists and other lowlife degenerates, like conscienceless advertising scum. And they’re actually worse when you look at it, because they pay a hell of a lot more to their church than WinDOH!s worshippers.

Many of us have heard of Linuxians, but think they are probably mythical. But they actually exist, albeit in numbers perhaps matching the Macosians, and are the true intellectual zealots of the modern age. Only the most intelligent, and those not pathetically fearful of change, become Linuxians. And that’s why most people think Linuxians are a frolic of the imagination – because most people are stupid.

But recently, a wave of conversions has swept the world, carried out by a sect of Linuxians known as the Ubuntunese. These magnificent warriors bow down to Ubuntu, now the chief deity in the Linux Pantheon. Ubuntu is a much more friendly god to his neophytes (affectionately known as “Newbies”) than the majority of his brethren – deities like Gentoo and Arch require much more dedication, and acolytes must feverishly pray weird incantations several times a day to appease them.

Valiantly the ever-growing army of Ubuntunese crusaders has fought a relentless jihad against the Microsoftites over the last three years, especially since the end of October, when Ubuntu entered his “Karmic“ phase. The fact that while he is in this particular half-yearly cycle (which was long prophesied, I should add) he is “cuddly as a koala” has seen mass conversions take place all over the globe. While he is even friendlier than usual, he is still a god of awesome power, and of course is not money-grabbing like WinDOH!s and Mac’os’X. So with each conversion comes a new stormtrooper, fighting against the corruption of false gods, and freeing those too terrified to escape the bondage they pay for.

I too have been converted, and now proudly proclaim I am a devout Ubuntunese soldier of enlightenment. I shall ridicule Microsoftites at every turn (I won’t bother with Macosians, since they’re so horrifically self-deluded it’s almost terrifying), and with my comrades emphasise the inadequacies of their religion, while expounding the freedoms we enjoy. I shall convert blaspheming, idolatrous infidels en masse, spreading the message of “Humanity to others“ to the ignorant and morally wretched.

If you want to find more about the road to Truth and Freedom, you can go to the church’s official site, or better yet visit the portal to the mind of my “maker”, the one who baptised me into the ways of Ubuntu. He is a man of great intellect and inscrutable character, which you can obviously tell from the fact that his name is also Frank (although, admittedly, with the grip the Microsoft Empire has on the web, he could be using an alias to avoid persecution, but in that case he has proved himself even more awesome by choosing that name).

Oh, and by the way, my ultimate god, Cthulhu, has no problem with all of this. In fact, he’s quite fine with it, especially since he’s sort of busy lying dead but dreaming in sunken R’lyeh. And, if you want to get technical, he’s more of a massive and horrendous alien with powers far beyond our understanding than a god, and actually he’s the high priest to the Elder Gods (but godlike enough for most of us mere mortals). He telepathically communicated to me simply that I should have a shiny black plastic, white-on-black theme for my desktop, and grab a kickass picture of him for my wallpaper.

Cern’deki Büyük Hadron Çarpıştırıcısı‘na ekmek kaçadursun benim kişisel hadron çarpıştırıcım, en azından çalıştırıcım olan emektar dizüstü bilgisayarımda işler fena gitmiyor. Yolun sonu dediğim ve saatler sonra vazgeçtiğim günden beri ilerleme kaydettim biraz. Aşağıdaki gibi sıralayabilirim galiba:

• lpms artık kendi deposunu tanımlayabiliyor. Bunu modüllerin ve depo tanımlayıcısının(repository.xml) dosyasının bulunduğu dizinde #lpms --index komutunu vererek yapıyorum ve gerisini lpms hallediyor. Depo dosyasından bir kesit aşağıda, bu blokdan yüzlerce olduğunu düşünün!

  <Module>
    <Name>pygtk</Name>
    <Description>GTK+2 bindings for Python</Description>
    <Homepage>www.pygtk.org</Homepage>
    <Version>2.16.0</Version>
    <Dependencies>
      <Dependency>gtk+</Dependency>
    </Dependencies>
    <Sha1sum>7a58be7a9e7a1c549cbb3708d0246877d699d6d9</Sha1sum>
  </Module>

Bağımlılık çözme konusunu şimdilik çözmüş olduğum için kafam rahat, sadece basit ve ufak işler var. Bayram dönüşü elle tutulur birşeyler düşebilir ortamlara. Neyse, sayısız fikir ve sorun ve tabii ki vizeler beni bekliyor. Görüşmek üzere…

Bu arada hadron nedir bu adam 293 kelime ile neyden bahsetti diyorsanız ya buraya tıklayın ya da hadron’un Aufs dosya sistemi üzerinde çalışan yeni bir dağıtım olduğunu bilmekle yetinin!

kimsenin ilgilenmedi bir konuda kimsenin ilgisini çekmeyen bir yazı daha

Reasoning

This blog is my attempt to keep an open journal on my adventure in revamping my ageing MythTV-based Home Theatre PC.  I plan to explain and track how I setup my new system here and perhaps turn it into a howto when complete.  Plus, this will keep me honest and perhaps I’ll bring this project to completion instead of leave it in a “good enough” state.

Background

I first setup a MythTV system based on the Gentoo Linux distribution about six years ago.  I named it Telly; so imaginative. That was when I had a cable TV feed in an attempt to only watch what I wanted to, rather than drown in the endless supply of craptacular shows that were shown when I decided to unwind after a long day’s work. It was great while it lasted, but I found myself using MythVideo more than any of the other features since I would rip and transcode a DVD that I’d rent to keep a copy for myself to watch later.  My system then began to morph into my personal webserver/svn server/file server and now forms the backbone of my home network.  It was natural since it was always running, and I had spent the time to make it very quiet and unobtrusive, sitting in my component stereo system stack.  Unfortunately, the machine is showing its age by not being able to nicely display hidef video and I have let its maintenance go, so at this point it isn’t easy to add or change software packages on it.  Besides, the motherboard’s CMOS battery seems to have died and it loses all the BIOS settings after a power outage (the only time the system is rebooted rather forcefully).  I’ve had average uptimes of 6 months.

After looking at a Sabayon LiveCD which had an XBMC standalone boot option I was inspired. I’ve always been a little annoyed with Myth’s UI and its foibles and I was aware that XBMC was great, but it only ran on an XBox game console back then. In the meantime, they’ve ported it to Linux and other OSes and I finally took it for a little spin. It has an awesome interface, and I can setup a MythTV backend to handle recording TV shows and stream them from the XBMC frontend – it is pretty extensible. I need new hardware to drive this system!

Previously I was using a VGA to component adapter (Audio Authority 9A60) which worked well, but was a royal pain to setup since I needed to figure out the video timings of my TV to get this to work.  Now that video cards support HDMI in Linux, I can plug that directly into the TV and it should Just Work, with a better picture.  If not, then perhaps I can justify buying a nice, shiny new LCD display.  I love new tech projects!  (when I have the cash, that is)

I’ll also use a more powerful  CPU.  I was using a lowly AMD AthlonXP 2800 which was fine for my needs six years ago.  I intend to use hardware accelerated video decoding, but that can’t handle any HD Flash video (yet) and I want to quickly transcode files while watching something as well. The newer CPUs have better power management features which I’ll take advantage of too.

Planned Hardware

The new system that I’m going to configure is going to be a mix of the old and the new.  I will reuse the old case, a big IDE harddrive, and one of my TV encoders.  Everything else will be new components.

Case
CoolerMaster ATC-600: My old case, which I think looks great and has 4 3.5″ drive bays and fits a microATX motherboard.  Aluminium faceplate with a retro swing-down access door and USB and firewire ports on the front.  I have an aluminium drive faceplate system which completes the look to cover up the cheap plastic DVD drive.  I had previously lined the top cover and sides with car speaker sound-proofing material to minimize any fan noise.  Fits nicely into a full-size component stereo stack.

TV Capture Card
Hauppage WinTV PVR-500: PCI card provides two TV tuners and encodes video and audio in hardware to MPEG2. Great quality and very tweakable in Linux. FM tuner included, if you want to go nuts.

Hard Drives
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10: 500 GB IDE drive from the old system. Very quiet and is very dependable.
Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EADS: New 1.5 TB SATA drive. Quiet, power efficient drive. Not the fastest, but we don’t need that performance.

Motherboard
Intel BOXDG43GT: I can’t find much information about this mainboard on the web so this is a bit of a gamble, but it is an Intel product which usually work very well under Linux. It has a quality Intel gigabit NIC, onboard video which I won’t use, and a new audio chipset by RealTek (ALC888S) which seems to be supported by ALSA with optical digital out that I’ll use.  I chose this mainboard because it was the only one that I could find on NewEgg at the time that supported all of the peripherals that I wanted to use while providing a bit of an upgrade path, if need be.  Now I can ditch using my Audigy PCI card for digital sound.

CPU and Cooler
Intel Pentium E6300 DualCore: Intel is getting very confusing with their naming schemes of late.  This CPU has plenty of power while still being relatively light on the electricity.  Although I am going for a system that has as much of the video processing offloaded onto hardware, there is still Hulu and Flash video to decode.  I also use this system as my core computer of my home network so it is important that it can handle anything that I throw at it. I was tempted to go for a Core2 Duo, but that isn’t worth the extra dollars for an extra MB of cache. Otherwise this CPU is pretty similar to that. I don’t intend to overclock the CPU, which would push up the heat levels.

Noctua NH-U9B 92mm SSO CPU Cooler: I need silence since this machine sits in my livingroom all day so the stock heatsink and fan won’t do. I needed to be choosy with a replacement since there isn’t much headroom in my case and the mainboard’s northbridge (onboard video) heatsink is quite big and close to the CPU socket. I chose this badboy because of its dimensions, effectiveness, silent operation, and its configuration will direct the airflow towards my case’s rear fans. Hopefully it will fit.

Video
MSI N210-MD512H GeForce 210: A PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP with 512 MB fast video ram should do the trick. This card was just released and doesn’t have a fan, so hopefully it won’t heat up the case too badly and throw errors. Choosing this card is a gamble since it is so new, but it has all the features I was looking for, namely quiet operation and the widest range of video decoding done in hardware (H.264, VC-1, WMV, DivX, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 HD). It can nicely upscale DVD playback as well and is actively supported in Linux. Linux zealots get weird about NVIDIA video cards since there are no open source drivers for these and some see it as “polluting” their machine by using a closed source driver. I’m more practical and always want to use the best approach for the job. While AMD have recently opened up the driver development for their ATI video cards, NVIDIA make the best accelerated video solutions for Linux and their life depends on maintaining that edge. As of this writing, I know that their Linux driver doesn’t support pushing sound through the HDMI cable, but that is ok since my stereo receiver doesn’t have any HDMI inputs (I’ll be using the mainboard’s digital optical output). I’m really looking forwards to putting this little beast to work.

Power Supply
SeaSonic S12II 330 Bronze 330W: I swear by these power supplies and have never been disappointed by SeaSonic’s quality and quiet operation. This power supply is highly efficient and sustains its power curve over a wide range of operating loads which reduces energy waste and power costs. This unit will make up for its higher cost in the power it will save over its (5 year warranty) lifetime. It has all the connectors that I need as well as being incredibly quiet.

RAM
G.SKILL 2 x 1GB (Dual Channel) DDR2 800: Cheapest RAM out there with the best quality for the price. Lifetime warranty if it goes bad – hopefully it will work with my mainboard.

Optical Media
LITE-ON 24x DVD Writer: I couldn’t find a plain DVD drive on NewEgg, where I was making my mass purchase. Crazy! Apparently, this SATA drive is quiet but I’m not expecting much. The brand has a good reputation.

Remote Control
Homebrew Serial IR Receiver: I never did get this to work on Telly and we became comfortable talking through the network or using a keyboard. Perhaps the the MB will make a difference, and I found better documentation since I last attempted to get it to work. I’ll use my Harmon Kardon Audio/Video Receiver’s remote.

• The trough of disillusionment for Ubuntu?
  “The Hype Cycle describes the way that new technologies and projects are perceived over time, if they do a good job of handling themselves, going from a technology trigger, inflated expectations, disillusionment, enlightenment, before arriving at “the plateau of productivity” – a state where there is no more hype and the new technology is simply a normal part of our lives.”

   

  The perception over the past few years that Gentoo is dying is in reality Gentoo’s arrival at the plateau of productivity. Hype has gone away and remaining is a distribution with a true niche that fits into the broader Linux ecosystem.

  (tags: gentoo communication)

Al menos en lo que a rendimiento se refiere, Gentoo es mejor que Ubuntu. Nada nuevo bajo el sol, ¿Por que se creen que uso Gentoo como mi único sistema operativo desde hace ya casi 4 años?

En la revista Linux Magazine se han tomado la molestia de comparar el rendimiento de cuatro diferentes niveles de optimización de GCC compilando un linux desde la base contra un sistema linux basado en binarios.

Para linux basado en código fuente usaron Gentoo, para linux basado en binarios usaron Ubuntu 9.04. El banco de pruebas usado fué Phoronix. El hardware, exactamente el mismo en todos los casos.

Basta con leer el artículo completo y ver los gráficos para ver como Gentoo gana en prácticamente todos y cada unos de los test realizados. Curiosamente, en el único terreno en donde Ubuntu sale triunfador es a la hora de juegos basados en binarios.

A pesar de esto y aún cuando no he usado Ubuntu en mi vida, sigo considerando a Ubuntu como la mejor distribución de linux, simplemente por que es la que mas gente atrae, y eso es lo mejor que se puede hacer por el pingüino.

Sin mas, les dejo el artículo completo -3 páginas, en inglés- en la revista Linux magazine:

Gentoo optimizations benchmarked

Mas pasa el tiempo, mas quiero mis Gentoo.

After checking out some videos on Plymouth booting on Fedora, I wanted to try this out. Luckily someone has already created an ebuild It’s pretty easy to set up as the ebuild installs everything you need to get it running (including ‘dracut’ wich really simplifies initrd creation)… that is except KMS because it’s still experimental. But that is in the works and seems to be running on most intel and radeon chipsets out there. Nvidia (Nouveau) will be supported somewhere in the future.

Currently using a Fjuitsu-Siemens AMILO Pa 2510 (could not find an official page).

Packages

Add this to your portage overlay http://bugs.gentoo.org/274065 and merge. Then run ‘plymouth-set-default-theme spinfinity’ to set the default theme.

Then you’ll need to install a kernel with KMS support. (>= 2.5.31)

NOTE: You’ll need xorg-server-1.6, mesa-7.3, libdrm-2.4 (-9999 ?), xf86-video-ati-6.12 (Or greater, preferably from GIT) to get X running with KMS. (I’m using libdrm-9999 and xf86-video-ati-9999  from the X11 portage overlay)

Enable KMS (Kernel Modesetting)

Plymouth requires KMS support in kernel (If not enabled you’ll get a boring text splash). This works flawlessly on my Radeon Mobile X1200 (Radeon Xpress 1200?) (ATI Technologies Inc RS690M)

I first tried 2.6.32-rc5-git3 but reverted to 2.6.31-gentoo-r4 as I got it working there.

Compile DRM as a module

Device Drivers --->
   Graphics Support --->
      <M> Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support)  --->
         <M>   ATI Radeon

Disable framebuffering

Device Drivers --->
   Graphics Support --->
      {*} Support for frame buffer devices  --->
         < >   VGA 16-color graphics support
         < >   Userspace VESA VGA graphics support
         < >   VESA VGA graphics support
         < >   ATI Radeon display support

Disable bootup logo (optional?)

Device Drivers --->
   Graphics Support --->
      [ ] Bootup logo  --->

Enable modesetting for radeon

Device Drivers --->
   [*] Staging drivers  --->
      [*]     Enable modesetting on radeon by default

Kernel and init image

Compile and install the kernel and run ‘dracut’ to create initrd image.

My /etc/dracut.conf

omit_dracutmodules="dmsquash-live mdraid crypt rpmversion redhat-i18n"
add_drivers="ath5k radeon drm"
mdadmconf="yes"

Grub

Remove any ‘vga’ arguments from kernel line and add ‘quiet splash’. (Note: I use grub 2, so config file might differ from yours)

menuentry "Gentoo GNU/Linux, with Linux 2.6.31-gentoo-r4" {
 insmod ext2
 set root=(hd0,2)
 search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 84d7a2c9-8071-4917-8122-3ac6bc84de38
 linux /vmlinuz-2.6.31-gentoo-r4 root=/dev/sda5 resume=/dev/sda8 ro quiet splash
 initrd  /initrd-2.6.31-gentoo-r4.img
}

Fixes

To fix problems with Plymouth hanging and/or XDM is slow on startup i added this to my /etc/conf.d/local.start :

if [ "$(pidof plymouth)" ] || [ "$(pidof plymouthd)" ] ; then
 # Method 1: (Not working)
 #/bin/plymouth quit --retain-splash &>/dev/null

 # Method 2
 /bin/plymouth --quit &>/dev/null
 chvt 7
fi

This script simply kills plymouth daemon and changes to virtual console number 7 (Where XDM stars). It will only do this if the daemon is running.

Result

Works perfectly at native resolution (1280×800@60) and  switching between console and X is now instant I haven’t noticed any slowdowns in X after enabling KMS. Booting seems to be the same (Haven’t checked in bootchart yet).

Problems

I haven’t got Plymouth working during reboot yet, and it’s being killed during the start up because it seems to halt the init process… so it’s not perfect. I’ll solve this later.

Some usefull links

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Plymouth

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/plymouth/

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/plymouth/tree/README

http://chakra-project.org/wiki/index.php/Plymouth (Intel users)

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup (Possibly deprecated)

Para aclarar de una buena vez los verdaderos beneficios de los diferentes niveles de optimización de GCC de Gentoo, la gente de la revista Linux Magazine publicó unas esclarecedoras pruebas donde midieron los resultados obtenidos usando las opciones -O2, -O3 y -Os y los compararon contra la performance de un Ubuntu 9.04 común y corriente. Las extensas pruebas se realizaron en la plataforma x86-64 usando el Phoronix Test Suite.

La conclusión definitiva es que, cuando se trata de optimizaciones usando GCC, no hay una gran diferencia entre ellas. Sin embargo, si se tuviera que elegir un ganador, probablemente sería la opción -O2, que aunque a veces fue mejor, a veces fue peor y a veces fue igual que la opción -O3, también redujo el uso de la memoria a su favor.

Por el lado bueno, y aunque quizás no sea una comparación justa, Gentoo sí superó a Ubuntu en casi todas las pruebas, en algunas con un buen margen, lo que significa que la optimización para un CPU específico sí puede traer una mejora apreciable en la performance general.

• Artículo completo en LWN.

If you’ve read about the TARDIS home server you’ll know that I use gentoo linux.

One thing that gentoo doesn’t get particularly right is the handling of upgrades that involve changes to configuration files in the /etc directory. Basically you get an interactive diff of the old and the recommended replacement (which doesn’t take into account any of your customisations).
Normally this limitation isn’t a big problem, but sometimes it can be annoying.
Something I highly recommend to help with this behaviour is putting the whole of the /etc directory into a mercurial repository and commit every time you think you’ve made changes that work.

I recently went from syslog-ng 2.X to syslog-ng 3.0.4 courtesy of a simple emerge – and, although things were being logged, everything was being logged everywhere, which was a bit excessive.

What I eventually learned is that syslog-ng is sensitive about the order of things on the ‘log’ line.
My old log file had many lines like this:

log { source(s_syst); destination(d_ntpd); filter(f_p_ntpd); flags(final); };

for that to work correctly in v3.X it has to become:

log { source(s_syst); filter(f_p_ntpd); destination(d_ntpd); flags(final); };

Note that the filters come before the destination.

“Программа просмотра журналов” или просто gnome-system-log это довольно удобное, а главное стандартное, средство в gnome для наблюдения за системными логами.

Для начала если вы еще не настраивали syslon-ng все таки сделайте это. Поскольку в этом виде syslon-ng будет создавать более сортированные и информативные логи.

Далее не забудьте о app-admin/logrotate иначе уже через несколько недель объем логов может вырасти до непомерно огромных величин. Чем это грозит надеюсь ясно.

А теперь что касается самого пациента.

Запустив gnome-system-log от обычного простого смертного пользователя как правило можно увидеть не на много больше чем на этом скриншоте:

Остальные логи как правило простым пользователям даже читать нельзя. Как поступать в этом случае решать лично вам. Я для себя решил эту задачу таким образом

> cat /etc/sudoers 

# sudoers file.
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
# Failure to use 'visudo' may result in syntax or file permission errors
# that prevent sudo from running.
#
# See the sudoers man page for the details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
(cut ибо много лишнего)
ALL ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/gnome-system-log

После этого кто угодно воспользовавшись командой

sudo /usr/bin/gnome-system-log

Сможет запустить gnome-system-log без всяких паролей и уже с правами root-а.

Далее от своего пользователя делаем

> cp /usr/share/applications/gnome-system-log.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
> nano ~/.local/share/applications/gnome-system-log.desktop

И если вы все правильно поняли то вам необходимо строчку

Exec=gnome-system-log

Привести к виду

Exec=sudo /usr/bin/gnome-system-log

Вуаля. После этого та же иконка в меню гнома будет запускать gnome-system-log уже с правами root.

Пол дела сделано… Теперь если вы послушались моего совета и настраивали syslon-ng вот так остается дело за малым.

Выполнение всего нижеследующего предполагается от root
В начале по простому

# Посмотреть текущий список логов которые отображает gnome-system-log
# его например можно сохранить на память... чтоб потом вернуть в исходное состояние
>gconftool-2 --get /apps/gnome-system-log/logfiles

# Установить список просматриваемых логов
gconftool-2 --set /apps/gnome-system-log/logfiles -t string "[/var/log/messages.log,/var/log/user.log,/var/log/syslog.log,/var/log/kernel.log,/var/log/iptables.log,/var/log/everything.log,/var/log/errors.log,/var/log/dmesg,/var/log/daemon.log,/var/log/auth.log,/var/log/acpid.log,/var/log/Xorg.0.log]"

Либо по сложному пути. Заходим от root, запускаем gconf-editor. И простыми манипуляциями с кнопочками “Добавить”, “Удалить”, “Изменить” приводим ключ /apps/gnome-system-log/logfiles к виду:

Ну и результаты трудов праведных

Самое главное список логов намного интереснее чем в начале.

Ну и мелкие прелести как то каждый лог разбит по датам это стандартаная фича самого gnome-system-log

Однако после такого “тюнинга” появляется возможность использую стандартный gnome-system-log наблюдать за практически всеми результатами работы системы в реальном времени. Ну и сам gnome-system-log стал на порядок более информативен а главное отсортирован и понятен.

La ricerca del perfetto blocco degli appunti digitali per appunti la ho iniziata alcuni anni fa.
All’epoca ero un minimalista fondamentalista, il mio sistema prevedeva openbox, rxvt-unicode, vim e firefox. Tutto il resto era superfluo, prima di installare qualcosa di eccessivamente legato a gnome sulla mia gentoo ci pensavo non meno di tre volte, e comunque controllavo minuziosamente le USE FLAG e verificavo con il --pretend che non venissero caricate troppe dipendenze. Dato che KDE le “troppe dipendenze” le aveva d’ufficio era un mondo a me quasi sconosciuto.

Ma anche nel mio Perfetto Desktop Environment c’era qualcosa di cui sentivo la mancanza: un programma da usare per prendere appunti. E con appunti intendo qualsiasi cosa: dalla lista della spesa (in forma di TODO, naturalmente) ai link della discografia dei Mercanti di Liquore (magari con immagini delle copertine), dalla sequenza di comandi per masterizzare un CD via command line al celebre “ricordati che devi morire“.

Quanto ho visto le caratteristiche di basket sono iniziati i dubbi esistenziali. Sembrava essere il programma da me desiderato (o quasi… ma so di essere fondamentalmente incontentabile) ma purtroppo si trascinava appresso mezzo KDE3.5, costringendomi ad aprire una lotta interiore con la mia parte fondamentalista. Nel mezzo delle riflessioni ho scoperto un’altro pezzo di KDE che mi sembrava particolarmente interessante: Kimdaba (poi rinominato in Kphotoalbum), a quel punto ho ceduto e installato il marasma delle kdelibs e affini. Nonostante un primo impatto non proprio amichevole a causa della proverbiale usabilità dei programmi KDE son trovato bene. Certo, non posso definirla una killer application (infatti ho continuato a cercare qualcosa che mi soddisfacesse appieno… ahimè inutilmente!) ma ho continuato ad usarla senza problemi, e siccome era comoda l’ho anche propagata sull’eeepc e sul computer del lavoro.

Da allora il modo è andato avanti: Nokia ha comprato Trolltech e con essa le Qt; Le Qt in versione 4.x con una montagna di cambiamenti rispetto alle precedenti; i KDE developers han rilasciato una major version del loro DE e i vari applicativi che avevo imparato ad apprezzare sono piano piano migrati alla nuova versione del DE e delle librerie sottostanti. Purtroppo non tutti, e così mi son trovato costretto a passare dal minimalismo fondamentalista del non aver nessuna versione di KDE installato all’averne due contemporaneamente.

Perché scrivo tutto questo? Perché adesso so che basket (o almeno, il suo stare ufficialmente nel portage tree di gentoo) ha i giorni contati:

# emerge -uDNtp world

These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

!!! The following installed packages are masked:
- kde-misc/basket-1.0.3.1 (masked by: package.mask)
/usr/portage/profiles/package.mask:
# Samuli Suominen  (28 Oct 2009)
# KDE3-only applications.
#
# Removed in 30 days.
#

The TARDIS Home Server

I already had a mail server in a Hush PC, but that had stayed behind in England (I accessed it remotely via ssh and SMTP/IMAP over TLS).
I liked the Hush PC, it was small, quiet, it happily ran headless, and most importantly it didn’t use much power.

My other PCs are all a bit hungry, but this home server was going to be on all the time and needed to be low power – so I quickly decided it was going to be a Mini-ITX Via motherboard (Intel Atoms were a long way off at this time, I make a lot of use of encryption so I’m not sure that I’d choose an Atom over Via’s padlock even now, I’d love to see some benchmarks).
And then I wanted a nice box for it.

I searched around for a nice existing box, something like an old radio or typewriter, but I couldn’t find anything.
Then Ali suggested a TARDIS.
It was just a simple throwaway comment, but it kept me busy for a while…

I would have liked to have been the first, but I knew I could be better than that one.
I also knew I wouldn’t be disappointed in the end result – because I knew exactly how well a Via board performed and for my purposes it was adequate.

I have been through a few routers in my time, but one of my favourites was the Linksys WRT54G3GV2 (with the HyperWRT Thibor firmware, I did some work to get Samba working with Vista and to fix bugs in UPnP, never got the latter sorter properly though).
That rather limited box made me want to have all my eggs in one basket, meaning a single power brick to a single device that would provide a home server, a decent number of gigabit Ethernet ports, router, and 802.11n wireless Ethernet.

The first step on construction was to make work out the dimensions and make some plans.
The new series TARDIS is rather more squat than the original TARDIS, this is a benefit for me so I decided to go with the new design.
I found a flat front picture that someone had made of the TARDIS and used that to base my plans on.
The plans themselves consisted of a pair of diagrams, done using Scribus, that showed the front and top of the TARDIS with dimensions.
I then printed these out 1:1 on an A3 inkjet printer.

The Basic Box

The Bare Box

One thing that I did wrong is the interaction between the light boxes and the corner posts.
In my design the light boxes go ‘through’ the corner posts, the normal way to make a TARDIS is for the corner posts to be solid all the way up and then to have the light boxes cut around the posts.
I found that I couldn’t actually cut away the corner posts reliably enough, so I’ve actually got the corner posts ending below the light boxes – there is then a small corner post on top of that and an end cap (the same cross section as the main corner post) on top of that.
The result is that it looks like the corner post is cut away, but if you look closely you can see that the corner post caps have a gap below them at the height of the top of the light box.
Each corner post is clad in very thin ply to provide the routed lip at the edge of the corner post (you can’t see the gap below the corner post cap on the finished image above, but you can see it on the image here).

The main (inner) square of the roof is made up of the same wood as the corner posts (providing a very solid square frame, once I’d managed to cut it neatly enough, it took a few goes).
The outer ridge on the roof is ~6mm balsa glued onto the outside of the main square – hiding a substantial part of the main square and providing two equal height steps down from the roof itself.
The angled roof itself is thin ply, with some kind of modelling material (probably milliput, but I’m not sure I could get hold of the real thing) under the joins holding it together (the angle of the roof of a real TARDIS is always much less than you imagine).

The light boxes are very delicate, very thin ply for the four sides with very fragile balsa, sanded round, making the front edges – which stand proud of the ply on the inside to provide a lip for the POLICE BOX sign.
There are a couple of lengths of dowel inside the light box to provide more support.
At this point the POLICE BOX sign itself is just a print out on an inkjer printer.
It took some experimentation (later in the project) to get the signs right – the end result is done using Scribus (and a very good approximation to the right font) and printed on the inkjet printer, this is then backed with acetate (to hold the printout in place) and behind that is some black card to stop light leaking through the main black areas.

The chamfer around the base is sanded from balsa glued on top of the MDF base itself.
This provides a hidden join between the walls and the base for a much neater effect (also the MDF wasn’t the right height).

The Detailed Box

Box With Panel Details

Each side has three long vertical strips of balsa (narrow for the sides and long for the middle) and ten short horizontal strips of balsa (with narrower strips top and bottom).
Each of these strips has been sanded to create the camfer, and the horizontal strips have been sanded on the back to fit over the vertical strips.
After the panels had been put together they were glued into the corner posts and then the door frames (balsa strips, roughly 2mm cross section) were added (hiding the edges of the detailing strips).

The window frames are very fine balsa (~1mm x ~1mm cross section) glued as complete frames and then glued onto the back of the detailing balsa (making the front of the window frames the same depth as the door panels).

The telephone panel on the front side is edged with more fine balsa and has a very thin balsa panel behind it (making it raised relative to the main door panels).

The idea for the lock was stolen from another TARDIS builder – it’s the barrel of a very small padlock, cut out and put into a hole drilled in the front door (I think that even now it hasn’t been glued).

The lamp took a very long time to get right.
Starting at the top there is a 1″ diameter dished metal washer (complete with hole in the middle that I never did fill in).
Below that is a wooden washer/wheel about 33mm in diameter and originally about 10mm thick – I drilled a large hole through the middle of it and sanded the bottom flat.
Hanging down from the wooden top are four nails – these are fixed through the wooden top (with their heads hidden by the metal washer) but are loose in the wooden block at the base so the central part can be accessed.
The wire frame came from offcuts of the back panel (though that was diamond shaped and needed stretching to make square) and the glass is a plastic tube (it took me a long time to find one that was the right size and I don’t remember now where I found it – I do have a collection of test tubes and plastic pots now though:)).
The lamp base is a just a block of MDF which sits on two support struts glued across the whole in the top of the angled roof (so that a lamp from below can be stuck into it).

Painting

Finding the right paint was a total nightmare.

Merchandise (printed media) related to the new series always tends to have a distincly purple tint to the box, but whenever I tried paint that colour on my tests it looked very wrong.
My conclusion was that it is more important for a model to look right than to be right – I don’t actually know what colour the TARDIS props are, but my TARDIS looks the right colour as seen on the TV (and if you disagree based on these pictures I’ll blame the colour reproduction of the images ).

Paint Test

The Final Paint Job

The telephone sign was printed from one found on the Internet somewhere.

The window panes themselves are cut from a plastic stationary-type wallet (a cheap thing for keeping your papers in). There are just three sheets cut out and stuck behind the three front & sides pairs of windows.

I think the light behind this image was just a torch sitting in the box.

That’s about it for the outside, the next stage was to prepare the insides.

The Back Panel

As I said before, the back panel began as a sheet of wire mesh.
This was them fitted with the same kind of detail as the other three sides, but with cutaways for access to the various ports.

The Back Panel

The Empty Box

On the back panel there are two holes for the two six-way CAT-6 patch panels; one large hole for the back panel of the mini-ITX motherboard; a large round hole for the power button; and a small round hole for the power lead.

Interior of Back Panel, With Fitments

Back Panel, With Fitments

The patch panel fittings were taken from a 12 port Cat 6 patch panel bought from Fry’s. The cable is solid core Cat 6 cable from a local cabling company in Redmond – they gave it to me for free because I only wanted about 15′ of it.
I have to be honest and say that I don’t know whether the motherboard back plane is still held on with insulating tape!

The Guts

Internal Tower, Rear View

Coming up from the drive bay are four threaded rods, with plastic tubes being used as spacers. The threaded rods hold up, in turn, the motherboard and the table – upon which the Netgear gigabit Ethernet switch and DLink 802.11n router sit.

Stuffed in by the side of the drives is the DC-DC power supply module (it was very awkward to get that to fit – if you’re building a custom Mini-ITX case remember to take into account both the DC-DC module and the cabling from it.

The Mini-ITX board I used has an IDE port (connected to a compact flash boot drive); and a couple of SATA ports (one of which is used to connect the Samsung 500GB physical disc).

Internal Tower, Front View

Preproduction Power Solution

Also shown here is the light strip that provides illumination behind the light boxes (and spills light through the main windows too), and the sounder that never made it into the finished thing (a server that sits silently in the corner but occasionally makes dematerialisation noises isn’t really that practical).

Stuffing It All In

Stuffing It All In

Also showing on this picture is the lid, with a long black cable (coming from a fan header on the PC board) snaking out to it.
The lid is a simple panel that rests on the light boxes and holds the light strip behind the light boxes. Without the lid there would be light leaking underneath the roof.

The image also shows that the rear light box is loose (the router is sitting where it should be). That light box has to be removable in order to get the back panel out, so it’s just held in place by the weight of the lid and the roof.

The Software

The Finished TARDIS

Since the start I’ve run exim for my email; samba file sharing; and an apache web server (for my own use only). I use the courier IMAP server (sometimes available externally, but these days I tend to lock it down for internal use only).

SSH has always been key to my use of the TARDIS, enabling me to have access to it whereever I may be (on an obscure port and usually locked down to known external IP ranges).

Sometimes I use rtorrent (with dtach), though not as much now I’m back in England and the television is better!

The fan is controlled via lm_sensors, and you can hear it spin up and down during the day (and more so at night when there is nothing else to drown it out – the TARDIS isn’t silent, but it is quiet).
The disc is also set to spin down when idle, but I don’t think it gets much opportunity to actually do so.

And Now

The TARDIS Today

The TARDIS is still my main home server, now with three or four PC clients and whatever Macs Ali is using.

In the US I had a cable modem, with a nice Cat 5 plug straight into my router, back in dear old Blighty I’m on ADSL, which is why there is that nasty ADSL modem visible in the picture.
There’s no space to fit the modem inside, there aren’t any decent 802.11n/gigabit/ADSL routers on the market, and anyway I’d need to cut a new hole in the back to account for the RJ11 connector.

It sits in the window and at night the glow seen outside is beautiful, but then I’m biased, the neighbours probably think I’m nuts.

Algunos consejos antes de instalar Gentoo.

Probar Gentoo viniendo de Ubuntu u otras distribuciones sencillas como OpenSuse, Mandriva o Fedora puede resultar un poco duro.

El primero es entender como funciona Gentoo, y eso es entender cómo funciona Portage, su sistema de gestión de paquetes.

El segundo consejo que daría yo sería probar antes Arch Linux. Esta distribución sigue el principio KISS, y se configura directamente sobre los archivos de Linux, pero de una manera más sencilla y clara que con Gentoo. Con Arch Linux aprenderás qué archivos necesitas retocar.

El tercer consejo es tener a mano, por si acaso, el archivo xorg.conf, que normalmente se encuentra en /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Este archivo sirve para configurar y hacer funcionar la IGU. Aunque se puede configurar automáticamente, a veces esto falla (como me ocurrió a mí ), y hacerlo a mano debe ser un infierno. No está de más tener a mano el xorg.conf de un alguien con un ordenador como el nuestro, y que ya sepamos que funciona.

Cuarto, leer. Leer el manual, yo lo seguí para instalarlo y me fue bien. Además, están la wiki y otras guías para configurar Gentoo a nuestro gusto, una vez instalado. Yo he usado ésta para escritorio XFCE. (No está de más que echéis un vistazo a la guía del escritorio que vayáis a instalar para ver que USE flags requiere y cuáles no).

Y el quinto y último consejo es paciencia, mucha paciencia. Instalar y configurar Gentoo no es precisamente rápido. Ello se debe a que en esta distribución no existen paquetes precompilados y tienes que compilarlo TODO, y esto lleva su tiempo… Para que os hagáis una idea echad un vistazo a esta entrada.

La verdad que es una distribución ligera y muy configurable, pero necesita de mucho tiempo para tenerla configurada y al día. Ya digo, no es para mi. Pero lo dicho, si os interesa, ánimo y al toro.

P.D: Aquí os dejo un archivo xorg.conf, por si os sirve. Es uno que encontré por Internet. Mi pc es un portátil Toshiba Satellite A80-131, con tarjeta gráfica nVidia GeForce 6200, tarjeta ethernet Marvell Yukon 88E8036 y tarjeta wifi Intel 2200BG.