Re: [gentoo-user] gentoo on ssds? intel anyone?
On Saturday 19 December 2009 12:19:05 Stefan G. Weichinger wrote: Am 19.12.2009 09:08, schrieb Stroller: Could anyone comment? Might it help if you said WHY you're unimpressed? might be ;-) It seems as if my system doesn't benefit that much: With 8 gigs of RAM, suspend-to-ram, preload and only a handful of rather lightweight binaries in regular use this system is already pretty fast with hdds only. I expected more WOW in terms of overall speed ... SSDs are not a magic bullet, it's unlikely they will give you a killer performance improvement that makes you go WOW!!! SSDs suck at random writes. Typical usage scenario on a workstation is lots of random writes compared to relatively few random reads - reads tend not to be all that random as you re-read the same thing often and it gets cached. Intel SSDs are far superior at random writes than any other SSD out there but it's still nowhere near as optimised as spinning drives, and kernels by and large are still optimised for spinning drives too. This may account for your overall feeling of under-whelmedness why still seeing a significant boot-time speed up. You also have enough RAM so that almost an entire typical workstation session could fit in RAM and seldom touch the disk especially with a large interval between disk syncs -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] freezing a package
On Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:03:19 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Create an local overlay. Put the ebuild in there. I'd also rename the ebuild to something like my-nvidia-drivers That way it becomes a completely new app from portage's point of view and therefore not subject to updated nvidia-drivers in portage which you might forget to mask That's a good idea, but it will require some editing of the ebuild as portage uses the name of the ebuild file to determine things like the download URL and where it is unpacked. As the version is not going to change again, you could replace the $P* references in the ebuild with hard-coded names. Overall, learning to use package.mask properly may be easier :) -- Neil Bothwick OPERATOR ERROR: Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, Nyah! signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] dolphin cannot display chinese
Am Samstag, 19. Dezember 2009 schrieb Xi Shen: hi, my X it self works well with chinese. but the dolphin does not work well with chinese. if any file contains chinese (or any non-ascii) characters, it simply will not be displayed in the list. how can i fix this? Can you see the file elsewhere? For example Konqueror or Konsole? -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla' Keyboard not connected, press F1 to continue. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
[gentoo-user] Switching AP from madwifi to ath5k
I've tried several times to switch from the madwifi wireless drivers to the in-kernel ath5k. Since I'm up to 2.6.32, I'd like to give it another try. It looks like wlan0 is starting in master mode and my laptop is connecting to it successfully. The problem is that shorewall won't start (for NAT) because it says the loc zone is empty. The only interface in the loc zone is wlan0, which is started by hostapd instead of the net.wlan0 initscript. Shouldn't shorewall know wlan0 has started? It doesn't check the initscript, does it? - Grant
[gentoo-user] No desktop after login with kdm
I had to hardreboot my laptop was totaly unresponsive to any input. Now that I have rebooted I can login with kdm but after that I have no desktop. I can open applications with krunner (alt+f2) but thats it. All the applications looks okay. Any ideas as to how I can resolve this? Ps I am unable to connect to dsl atm am unable to send any kind of logs atm. Sending this from my phone . Thanks regards Nelis
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Preparing a laptop for sale
Does the USB stick still boot? It looks like you wiped the wrong device. Bingo, right as usual! Apparently I wiped the USB stick. I ran fdisk and mk2fs -j again (do I want journaling?) and reinstalled Damn Small Linux on the stick. For some reason the laptop tell me missing operating system when I try to boot from the stick now. I need to test it on other systems. Grant, Take a deep breath and hhink about what you're doing for a second. Did you just copy files to the stick and expect that it would boot? It' still needs a bootloader (LILO, GRUB, SYSLINUX, or whatever) in order to load the OS on the stick. Your dd wiped out *everything* unetbootin does go through a step called Installing Bootloader. I also tried installing Super Grub Disk and Smart Boot Manager via unetbootin, both of which are specifically described as bootloaders. Still nothing. Could that dd have wiped out something else on the USB stick that is important for boot? Is there a quick way to install a bootloader manually, so I can see if that works? I tried to adapt this but couldn't come up with a procedure I though would be correct: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1chap=10#doc_chap2 - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Preparing a laptop for sale
On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 01:56:39PM -0800, Penguin Lover Grant squawked: Is there a quick way to install a bootloader manually, so I can see if that works? I tried to adapt this but couldn't come up with a procedure I though would be correct: Don't know about the distro you were trying to install, but when I need a bootable USB disk with utils, I usually go with System Rescue CD http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_How_to_install_SystemRescueCd_on_an_USB-stick Maybe you forgot to mark the filesystem bootable? Cheers, W -- The particle physicists use order parameter fields, too. Their order parameter fields also hide lots of details about what their quarks and gluons are composed of. The main difference is that they don't know of what their fields are composed. It ought to be reassuring to them that we don't always find our greater knowledge very helpful. ~James P. Sethna Order Parameters, Broken Symmetry, and Topology Sortir en Pantoufles: up 1108 days, 22:19
[gentoo-user] [lame logrotate Q]
Can anyone show me how to write a logrotate rule that will rotate on
either size or age?
I use some very simple scripting for yrs but don't really see how to
rotate on more than one condition.
I'd like to rotate a certain log weekly or over 7000k and keep no more
than 12 rotations for whatever reason.
/var/log/debug.log {
create 0600 reader wheel
weekly || size=7000k
rotate 12
postrotate
/etc/init.d/rsyslog reload /dev/null 21 || true
endscript
}
Is clearly NOT the right way to go.
Any know how to do it?
Re: [gentoo-user] dolphin cannot display chinese
On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Frank Steinmetzger war...@gmx.de wrote: Am Samstag, 19. Dezember 2009 schrieb Xi Shen: hi, my X it self works well with chinese. but the dolphin does not work well with chinese. if any file contains chinese (or any non-ascii) characters, it simply will not be displayed in the list. how can i fix this? Can you see the file elsewhere? For example Konqueror or Konsole? -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla' Keyboard not connected, press F1 to continue. yes, i can see it in konsole, but the characters are not readable. -- Best Regards, David Shen http://twitter.com/davidshen84/ http://meme.yahoo.com/davidshen84/
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: dd - bytes at a time
On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:11:27 +, Stroller wrote: Incidentally, if you want to use dd, adding bs=4096 speeds it up quite significantly. Thank you. I have always wondered what the optimal bs might be. And why - could you possibly explain that, please? Is bs=4096 best for all disk-based operations? Many filesystems are set up with 4K blocks, so matching this with dd is more efficient. The default is 512 byte blocks and anything larger than this is good, I sometimes use 40960 but that isn't significantly faster. I prefer to avoid using dd on hard disks altogether, it's just so damn slow for large amounts of data. -- Neil Bothwick You can't teach a new mouse old clicks. My *completely uneducated* guess would be that, for a raw disk level copy (on a normal spinning disk) or write a bs that is *at the least* divisible into the drive's cache size, and at best *is* the drive's cache size, would be best. For SSDs, if you have some strange reason to need to use dd with one (I'd avoid it simply because a: you'll never guarantee an overwrite of what's really there now and b: you'll be put at least a small dent in the lifespan of the drive) the minimum erase block size would be best, since that'd allow both a full erase and a full write of a block, rather than risking 2 erases to get all of one block written. I do reiterate that this is all mere conjecture, and is based in my likely flawed conceptual understanding of the drives. -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
Re: [gentoo-user] [lame logrotate Q]
Harry Putnam wrote:
Can anyone show me how to write a logrotate rule that will rotate on
either size or age?
I use some very simple scripting for yrs but don't really see how to
rotate on more than one condition.
I'd like to rotate a certain log weekly or over 7000k and keep no more
than 12 rotations for whatever reason.
/var/log/debug.log {
create 0600 reader wheel
weekly || size=7000k
rotate 12
postrotate
/etc/init.d/rsyslog reload /dev/null 21 || true
endscript
}
Is clearly NOT the right way to go.
Any know how to do it?
man logrotate has a few examples that may help. Here is one.
/var/log/httpd/access.log /var/log/httpd/error.log {
rotate 5
mail w...@my.org
size 100k
sharedscripts
postrotate
/usr/bin/killall -HUP httpd
endscript
}
I notice that the size part is on its own line which may be the issue.
Dale
:-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] off-topic: logitech mice (MX1000)
On 12/15/2009 11:11 AM, Allan Gottlieb wrote: It seems to me that this mouse sends two button events for some of the physical buttons. For example moving the wheel to the left reports button press 13 button press 6 button release 6 button release 13 Similar results for the many other buttons on the beast. Is this what the device actually does or does it signify a faulty X setup on my part? I have the evdev driver in my kernel. I use xorg.conf and have Section InputDevice Identifier Logitech MX1000 Driver evdev Option Device /dev/input/event2 EndSection gottl...@allan /dev/input/by-id $ ls -l /dev/input/by-id/usb-Logitech_USB_Receiver-event-mouse lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Dec 15 11:20 /dev/input/by-id/usb-Logitech_USB_Receiver-event-mouse - ../event2 As I recall, the fix for this problem is a sys-adm/lomoco. Logitech mice actually produce those double events... lomoco allows you tell the mouse to stop. I've got a udev rule for it, I think lomoco put it there, but I've had logitech MX mice for years and lomoco is a fork of a fork and may no longer contain the udev script. You also might look into imwheel from the Mandrake distrabution as it contains patches to deal with more than 10 buttons.
