Nice little summary of great features of the 2.6.28 kernel. I have to agree. I just installed the 2.6.28 kernel as part of my new Funtoo install a few days ago, and I haven’t run into any problems yet. I’m about to give ext4 a try. Hopefully all goes well.
[excerpt]
This Christmas Linux kernel release brings several great new features to Linux, and its improvements promise even more Linux desktop goodness in the future.[/excerpt]
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I can’t believe I never saw this before. Sourceforge has an absolutely HUGE list of tips and tricks. There’s hundreds of Linux tips and lots of programming tips as well.
Tags: programming, tips, tricks
This is really old news, but it’s new news to me because I just noticed this.
Daniel Robbins Funtoo site now has some articles on it that he recently created. Right now, he has posted some of the articles that we’ve previously seen on the IBM Developer Works website, but there’s also now a quide for installing Funtoo.
CPAN is great for easily installing and updating Perl modules. I use it all of the time on my servers. It’s a lot easier than managing Perl modules through the systems package manager. The problem is, when you want to install or update a Perl module, it asks you if you want to follow and install all of the dependencies and the dependencies for that… and so on. Sometimes you want to be anal and make sure it doesn’t install any extra crap, but quite often, it would be nice to just have it install what it needs automatically, so you can walk away and do other things while it’s installing.
I found this nice little blog post that shows you how to have CPAN automatically install all of the dependencies without prompting you.
Tags: cpan, Linux, tips, unattended
Today I had a need to keep the load on a server at 20 for an extended period of time. I was doing this to test notification escalations in Nagios. So, I found a nice little program call cpuburn-in that will load a processor at 100%. It’s just a tarball with an executable and a single README file included. To run the program, call the executable and supply the number of minutes you want it to run. So, to run it for 60 minutes, just use:
./cpuburn-in 60 |
Since I wanted to generate a 20 load on the server for 60 minutes, I just put this in a loop and spawned 20 processes.
i=1; while [ $i -le 20 ];do ./cpuburn-in 60 & i=$(( $i + 1 ));done |
This worked nicely for keeping the load right around 20 for me. If you want to kill things off early, just do the following:
ps a | grep cpuburn-in | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill |
Tags: Linux, load testing, tips
I’ve seen many websites that have pretty much the same ext3 performance tips, but I just came across this one today that had something very useful on it.
It turns out that the ext3 filesystem by default reserves 5% of the disk space of the volume just in case the volume fills up. This would allow the system to continue running and allow the root user to still log in and clean things up. The problem is, 5% of a 300G drive is 15G, which is pretty excessive. Like most things, this setting can be changed uisng the tune2fs program. I changed my percentage of reserved blocks to 1% instead of 5% which freed up 10G on my drive.
This was very easy to do with the following:
# tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sda1 |
So I figured what the heck, I might as well install some stats software if I ever plan on updating my blog. So, I just installed a Google Analytics plugin. Of course, I’ll have to wait a bit for it to start showing some stats.
Tags: website
I don’t know why they didn’t post this on the Gentoo front page, but obviously the October GMN is not coming. If you are on the ‘Gentoo-dev-announce’ mailing list, you would have seen Anant mention what’s going on with the GMN.
Hi Folks,
I’ve been extremely busy traveling & attending conferences for the last few weeks and will be required to continue the same for atleast 2 weeks more; and nightmorph is just recovering from his failed hardware. As a result, there will be no October issue of the GMN. We hope to resume to normality by the end of November.
Apologies.
–
Anant
I just noticed on planet gentoo that a developer, Sven Vermeulen aka swift, has posted a draft of his new ebook on Gentoo Linux. I couldn’t figure out a way to register to post a comment, so I thought I would post something in my blog about it. I haven’t had a chance to do much more than glance at the book, but wow! There sure is a lot of information there. The book is distributed with the Creative Commons license.
Thanks Sven for taking the time to write a book about our favorite distro. 
