Archive for the 'Gentoo' Category
Monday, June 19th, 2006
Mind Map of Linux Distros
I actually have a printout of this in my office – wasn’t sure where I found it. Now I know - it’s here.
Thursday, May 25th, 2006
“Open” analysts with new biz model grab InformationWeek’s attention
Just sat down to page through InformationWeek… and on page 47 (or click here for online story) noticed quite a write up about the “new” breed of analysts out there – most of which are sharing analysis and insights in the “open” in a somewhat community discussion style. This should be a pretty interesting study on industries that undergo change – the old either goes out or adapts with the new over time. Usually the old doesn’t change until the new take enough market share to force change… should be interesting to watch how this transition unfolds. You can check out Stephen O’Grady’s blog here.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned was that the blog/podcast medium really brings out the personality/flavor versus some of the stuffy, over pompous [insert big firm name here] reports you just can’t wait to throw in your trash bin…
The model of analyst firms always intrigued me – especially when most companies have experts in house that know more than analysts do… some of the top technologists I’ve ever met are at Wall Street firms… and analysts rely on those technologists to do their “analysis” … and yet the Wall St. Firm’s CIO pays the big analyst firms big money… to repeat what their technologists said… make sense?
For instance, what does Laura DiDio at Yankee Group know? She was an “investigative news” reporter before joining Yankee Group… as an IT Analyst. No, I’m not kidding. Admittedly, those Wall St. firms probably wouldn’t let her in the door, yet she gets quite a bit of publicity through Microsoft saying Linux “isn’t there yet” for SMBs… yet we all know a number of SMB shops who are loving Linux.
“DiDio began her reporting career in the mainstream and business press. As an investigative reporter, she worked for various broadcasting and print outlets, including CNN, Channel 5 News in New York and Channel 11 in Minneapolis.”
I welcome the “new” group of analysts. An open, frank discussion in public tends to weed out bias and develop a community consensus with all sides of an argument out on the table – similar to that thing called open source. What I really like to see is the analysts who eat the food they promote – it’s one thing to talk about what you’re seeing customers use Linux for – it’s another to use it yourself and talk with customers. Who was the last [big firm] analyst quoted about Linux that uses it themselves?
Friday, May 19th, 2006
Changing the top image on an XGL “cube”
Ok, so you’ve gotten over the initial shock that you can twist turn and rotate your XGL desktop. Now you notice that grey, glah image at the top of the cube and wonder… “can I change that?” Of course you can.
First, copy your image as a .png over to /usr/share/compiz/ as root. Let’s say its image.png
Fire up gconf-editor and first go to key “apps -> compiz -> plugins -> cube -> screen0 -> options” and edit the “images” key and add an entry for “image.png” in the order you want for priority. If you twist your cube to reveal the top you should see your image now.
Next try this – go to “apps -> compiz -> plugins -> rotate -> screen0 -> options” and turn on (check) the snap-top key. This allows you to turn the cube so you’re looking at the top and the top will then snap into place to cover your screen as if it were another workspace.
Snaps into place to show:
Gentoo logo on an OpenSUSE Desktop cube…
Next up – skydome – the background around the cube… you can even animate it.
Thanks Moosy – you pointed me to the right places.
Monday, May 15th, 2006
In Depth OpenSUSE 10.1 Review and other rants…
Ok, ok, so I blew away my Gentoo partition and loaded OpenSUSE 10.1 over the weekend… seemed a fun idea at the time. Now that I recall how many hours went into building the perfect Gentoo setup… I regret it a little. I’m going to buy a server, and am torn between OpenSUSE with Xen or Gentoo…
Anyway, I signed up for Cablevision’s BOOST service which gets me a static IP and tons of bandwidth – so now I can migrate my website/email over to a home server and dump the Windows loving GoDaddy/SenderID mess that I’m on right now. After probably 3-4 hours of explaining to tech support folks at GoDaddy exactly what their problem was that was screwing up the ability for people to email me, I had no resolution… then about a week later, they magically corrected the config I was complaining about. Seems someone else was likely in the same boat as I.
I think tech support hotlines should have a menu option to gauge/input your ability. The problem I have is that I never call for a level 1/2 problem… I know how to fix those on my own. When I call a tech support # it’s always b/c they have goofed something and I can’t fix it myself. But I do understand that there are many “technically challenged” folks out there that probably need help setting up their email.
I propose something as simple as:
- “Press (1) if you admit to being computer illiterate and sometimes wonder why a mouse has 2 buttons,
- Press (2) if you know what email is, can browse the Internet but don’t know what at least one of ‘Linux, Aqua or MMC’ are/do, and
- Press (3) if you can program, do sys admin work and you’re the guy who all of your friends/family/coworkers and the local consultants call if they can’t fix a problem.”
I think this would make it very simple to cater to various skill levels…
Anyway, here’s a great walkthrough of OpenSUSE 10.1. My first complaint is that the Xen kernel won’t let you install nVidia drivers – which prevents you from using XGL – which I’m very accustomed to having… I really, really wish ATI and nVidia would just get over their “my driver is proprietary” attitude and get real GPL drivers into the kernel… GPL is mutual assured destruction and 1 of them can’t just poach the drivers/work of the other NOTE TO NVIDIA/ATI: YOU’RE BOTH DUMPING WAY TO MUCH INTO DRIVERS AND JUST DUPLICATING WORK – GET OVER IT, OPEN SOURCE THEM, MAKE IT EASY ON USERS, AND SAVE SOME DEV MONEY…
Yeah so other than that, the interface, bootup, and menu work is excellent. They did a great job cleaning up the crap in all the typical KDE/Gnome menus. I’m running Gnome now… kinda kills Stephen’s IBM-KDE conspiracy theory but hey, I’ve always been prone to switching back and forth.
Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006
eWeek Reviews Gentoo 2006.0
Gentoo rarely seems to get attention outside the developer and admin communities and I was shocked to see eWeek actually do a review of 2006.0. But hey, how cool is that??
One thing they seem to have missed is the absolutely brilliant levels of support provided on the Gentoo Forums. I think the Gentoo forums are quite possibly the best support mechanism I’ve ever encountered.
Tuesday, April 11th, 2006
SystemTap in Gentoo
If you didn’t know already, SystemTap is in Gentoo’s public portage tree. Just try an “emerge systemtap” and it should work. Just make sure to have both relayfs and kprobes enabled in your kernel before the emerge. [[updated: I've been told procfs works as well and relayfs is not a requirement]]]
I just met with Stephen O’Grady and had an IBMer brief him on SystemTap while in Boston for LinuxWorld last week. He put together a nice write up on his blog over here.
Stephen also pointed out a cool derivative of top called ‘htop’ – just ‘emerge htop’ and take a look.
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006
XGL – KDE and Gnome Finally
Ok, so I’ve streamlined my XGL implementation and have it working with both Gnome and KDE. Have to admit the trickiest part was figuring out that you have to compile compiz with gnome support (even if using KDE) to get gnome-window-decorator to compile properly…. then figuring out the load order for compiz to load and then launch KDE/Gnome was fun. All in all not such a bad experience. This time it’s running MUCH faster than when I first got it running on KDE – not sure what the hangup was but I think it’s b/c I’m using a newer source. However, KDE is running slower than Gnome – I’ll chalk it up to XGL being closely tied to Gnome at this point.
With XGL Gnome is running at approx 0.7% – 7% CPU utilization while KDE runs at about 30-40% CPU utilization. Sounds like either a bug or a result of having to use gnome-window-decorator and not one derived from Qt.
I’ll post a walkthrough on how I got setup when I get a free minute (could be a while). Honestly the Gentoo XGL guide was ok… needs some touches. I still need to figure out why I can’t shutdown KDE/Gnome without X freezing…
XGL and KDE -> a rare combo it seems…
Wednesday, March 15th, 2006
Kororaa XGL LiveCD gets Impressive A+
I’m floored by how impressive this Kororaa Gentoo/XGL Live CD is. The clean, Apple-style theme, and polished Gnome setup is very nice all the way through. This LiveCD came out so fast after XGL’s release that I expected a “kinda working”, “buggy” implementation. It’s far from that. I’m able to use all (I think) XGL features and best of all – it’s fast as can be. Now I know it was just me screwing something up when I saw terrible KDE/XGL performance on my Gentoo setup… I’ll have to figure out what I did wrong.
For now though, XGL is very impressive eye candy. Not sure there’s any real… say productivity gain… but it definitely makes it more fun to use multiple workspaces on Linux. One thing I will have to figure out is if we can put different backgrounds on each of the cube faces. First I’ll have to get it working properly. More to come now that I know it was just my error ;-)
Tuesday, March 14th, 2006
XGL without all the mess
I’m currently downloading Kororaa – a Gentoo XGL LiveCD from bittorrent. I’m interested in seeing how it performs on my system with Chris Smart’s kit. My initial post on XGL performance caused a few notes to appear in my inbox… maybe this LiveCD will uncover something I did wrong. I did notice turning off transparency did wonders on my KDE/XGL implementation.
Monday, March 13th, 2006
XGL on Gentoo
Wish I had seen this before having to figure out the steps on my own… a HOWTO for Gentoo and XGL. You can see my comments below – XGL kills the resources on my Dell Inspiron 8200 – you may have better luck with newer HW.
I like XGL b/c it’s “cool” eye candy, yet I haven’t seen anything yet that is revolutionary or productive… OS X has had these features for a while and X has always had multiple desktops… maybe we’ll see something innovative come yet…
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