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PCLinuxOS – 30 Days to #1

PCLinuxOS has continued its upward climb on the distrowatch page hit meter. It is #1 over the span of 30 days…most likely due to the recent release of 2007 Final. Is it really that good? I think it is. It’s powerful enough to satisfy my nerdiest inclination to program and yet soft enough to pad my wife’s computing needs as well. I’ve found it suitable for all my computing needs. Does this mean I’m done looking for the perfect desktop? Far from it! I’ll continue that hunt until I can’t continue it at all.

For now, PCLinuxOS is my #1 desktop choice for my main computer…with other computers in my household rotating distros at quite a good pace. This blog often focuses on items of interest to the desktop Linux user…and it’s updated quite infrequently. This should change after June as I’ll begin a new job in a new city working with Linux on a daily basis 😀

Look for more frequent updates and more robust content. I’m also going to be moving away from a KDE Centric blog and experimenting around quite a bit with the Gnome desktop as well by way of Foresight Linux. Quite a bit on the horizon so please stay tuned.

Tux500 YouTube Video

Some of you may know that my friend Helios (aka Ken Starks of Lobby4linux.com and Blog of Helios) has been working on the Tux500 project which is geared at getting Linux on a car in the Indy500. Take a look at this video made by Tux500.com that explains a bit about the Indy500 and why it is important for Linux to be there.

Very professional. Make sure you Digg the video as well!

Speed Tweaking PCLinuxOS 2007 TR3

Using PCLinuxOS 2007 TR3 for the last few weeks, I’ve noticed VAST improvements over the .93a release. The most noticable of these is boot times. My boot time is absolutely amazing on this Dell E521n…it averages 30-40 seconds. That’s right. 30-40 SECONDS. I was floored the first time I booted after install. I thought I had done something wrong. I quickly rebooted and got out the stopwatch and recorded 32 seconds as my official time. I rebooted another 5-6 times and averaged in between 30-40 seconds each time and was closer to 30 on 8 out of 10 boots. Absolutely amazing.

Linux, with projects like upstart which is being considered for the next release of Ubuntu, are getting to the point now where boot times will drop considerably. This is welcome as far as I’m concerned…it allows you to get going right away with your business be it personal or other.

Once you’re logged in though…many people don’t touch the OS itself and instead leave it at the default settings. For most people this is ok…as not having something set to be optimized is ok and most distro rollers setup their distros so that they cause the least amount of problems for the most variety of hardware. For me, I like to mess around. I like to play. “I like the night life…I like to boogie”

So without further silliness and introductional nonsense, I proudly present a bunch of data that I gathered from various sources (cited where possible) and a few tricks of my own that will allow most rpm based distros to tweak their way into improved performance. Since I did this specifically for the PCLinuxOS community though, I’ve titled the article accordingly. As it is, the article should work for most Fedora’s and Mandriva’s and possibly even OpenSuse.

Continue reading “Speed Tweaking PCLinuxOS 2007 TR3”

Indy 500 and Linux Not Newsworthy?

There’s a HUGE piece of news out there for Linux as an operating system…and I have only seen it published on Lxer.com, Linuxtoday.com and Digg.com. LINUX IS GOING TO THE INDIANAPOLIS 500!! This is HUGE for ALL Linux distributions…not just one. This is something that can show all those people out there what the Linux community is all about…collaboration, community, camaraderie, and drive….drive that can’t be found in commercial ventures. But where, oh where, is the community reporting this news? The interesting thing is, they aren’t…and It’s very odd as to why they aren’t reporting this and rallying around it.

Perhaps they’ve just missed it…and in that case I hope they pick up on it soon. Perhaps they don’t know much about it? In that case they need to head over to Tux500.com and read all about it. Don’t know what the Indy 500 is about? Once again, Tux500.com explains it for you.

For those of you who don’t know what this is about and who haven’t clicked on those Tuxme500.com links above…allow me to explain a bit. I encourage you to head over to that website after reading through this post.

My friend helios who authors “Blog of helios” and is admin over at lobby4linux.com has unveiled a huge project of getting Linux to sponsor an Indianapolis 500 racecar in this years Indy 500. Of course, Ken isn’t working alone…the website tux500.com has been launched to track donations and become a center of operations for the initiative. The goal is $350,000 for full sponsorship of the Indy Car.

Crazy? Maybe. Innovative? Yep. Attainable? With help, it could be. Without Linux news websites and enthusiasts getting the word out though it will fall flat on its face.

I mention this because this isn’t a local thing…it’s not just being displayed in a few places that post Linux news…this is being displayed on a larger scale. It’s also got an entire marketing team behind it. This is a first for Linux…generic Linux. This isn’t about a distribution. This isn’t about a flavor you like to run on X laptop or Y Desktop. This is about LINUX. odorless (hopefully), colorless, neutral Linux. All communities should see the benefit of this.

As I mentioned, this isn’t local. Speedtv (yes…the US cable channel) has picked up on this marketing drive and has published an article on their website. The Auto Channel has also picked up on it. Motorsport.com has jumped into the fray. UPDATE: Indy500.com has now published an article about Linux and it’s sponsorship as well. As of the publishing of this article though…I’ve only seen this huge news hit 2 major Linux website. This is exposure that Linux hasn’t ever had. To be associated one of the largest Sporting events in the world (from Wikipedia “having the largest attendance and one of the largest radio and television audiences of any single-day sporting event worldwide).

Worldwide. Largest audiences and attendance. Is anyone listening to what this could mean for Linux? Is this microphone on?

I’m flabbergasted as to why more Linux news sites haven’t picked this up. I’m floored as to why no one is lobbying Red Hat, Ubuntu, Novell, IBM, Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, and other Linux companies to donate what they can. Those companies could secure a logo for 25k on the side of the car. They could donate 50k and put 25k toward this initiative AND get their logo spread on the car. What will they do? Do they believe in Linux as much as the community they are a part of does? This is huge…it can’t get any bigger and it seems we’re sitting on our hands here.

The goal is $350,000…which is a large sum of money. However, from the Tux500.com’s FAQ page, $25,000 can garner a Linux sponsorship…which is also good exposure. So at the very least, we can get Linux into the limelight as a sponsor.

Now I know some of you may be saying “How do I know that my donation is getting spent on this and not to grab someone a Ferrari?” and you’d be right in asking that question. I’d like to put this to rest right now. The paypal account used to house donations has third party access from two well respected Linux journalists/editors…Don Parris of Lxer.com and Brian Proffitt of Linuxtoday.com. They will be operating as auditors for the fundraising of this endeavor and will see all funds in and out of the account. Mr. Proffitt has also “agreed to verify any public statements made about the current fund amount when asked”.

Lobby4Linux.com also announced that donations were being tracked by distribution. This means that when you donate, you input your favorite distro that you’re donating on behalf of. The demographics of these donations will be released after fundraising is over. So, for those of you who want go get some exposure for your distribution…there is a way for you to do so.

Not only that, but graphics designers have a chance to design the logo that is going onto the car…this could be huge for whoever that may be. It could launch a career of a little known designer. So if you’ve got elite graphics skills, get to designing! The deadline is April 30, 2007.

To all of the Linux news websites out there…I challenge you to report Linux news and let the community know about it. To all bloggers out there, this is a chance to help push Linux into areas it’s never been and onto TV sets of 5.5 million Americans and even more people worldwide. Help Bob Moore and Ken aka helios, the two catalysts and organizers of this huge push for Linux, attain that goal and get Linux onto that car! It can be done…but it needs your help to do so.

Reference Websites:

http://blog.lobby4linux.com
http://lobby4linux.com
http://tux500.com
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/85530/index.html

Dell and the Linux Desktop

There’s quite a bit of speculation going on at what distribution of Linux Dell will choose to put onto its desktops or if they’ll even attempt to put Linux on the desktop.

In my opinion, it would be smart for them to do this…mainly because there is so much marketing momentum behind this right now they’d be a fool not to take advantage of it…and they didn’t have to pay a dime for it either. Most companies would kill for their blog to receive as much attention as the Dell Linux Blog and Idea Storm has gotten in the past few months…and they’d kill for the huge amounts of media attention the Dell Linux Survey and Announcement of Certified Linux Computers are also getting.

I think Dell will ride this Linux wave in…but not how most people think they will. Most people think Dell will listen to tons of people filling out the surveys telling them Ubuntu. But examining this from a business perspective and Ubuntu becomes the lowest choice on the totem pole. I believe they’ll surprise everyone with a different move that would get them the most out of their business AND personal Computer lines. I think they will (if they choose any distribution at all) choose Fedora Core or RHEL Desktop and not Ubuntu.

Why would they do this? To be tied to Red Hat more of course. This allows them to do less to certify their hardware for Red Hat and you can bet that if Linux is on the desktop pre-installed that they’ll offer it on the server. I think this would be a good deal for both Red Hat and for Dell…even though it’s Fedora it opens the door a bit and since Fedora is a test ground for RHEL, choosing it is beneficial all around.

I believe (since we’re speculating here) that Dell will snuggle up to Red Hat as much as they possibly can and that it will benefit both of their businesses in a HUGE way.

The thing that makes me think this is Red Hat’s sudden (re)interest in the desktop has odd timing. Is it purely coincidental? Is it random chance? Is it just speculation? Who knows. One thing is for certain…when a company get’s big, nothing it does is pure chance.

And what of Novell? If we truly want to speculate, Novell is also a better choice than Ubuntu…because of the existing agreement with Microsoft, Suse also looks better for Dell because of their own ties to Microsoft. So, we’ve got two distros that have more going for them than Ubuntu does…which may or may not be a good thing. So who will Dell choose if they choose at all?

Anyone else care to speculate?

Dealing with Runaway Processes

Have you ever been using your Linux distro and suddenly found a program won’t close? It’s frustrating when an application hangs. In Windows, one could right click on the taskbar and choose “Task Manager” and kill the hanging process (which doesn’t always work BTW). In Linux, you can also kill these hanging processes.

First, if you’re using KDE press Control-Escape. This will give all processes in a handy window called the KDE System Guard. Clicking the column heading for “System %” so the arrow on it appears facing up will sort the processes from highest system percentage to lowest. Find the process that seems to be hogging up all the resources (or if you know the name of the process, highlight that) and then hit the kill button. Your process should end it’s routines and exit.

You can also check out which program is hogging up your virtual memory with its process which can also slow things up. Clicking on the column “VmSize” and sorting largest to smallest will allow you to see this and select which process to kill. I often elect to select only user processes using the drop down menu at the top right hand corner of the KDE System Guard. Doing this filters out all system files and shows any hanging applications that are initiated by the user (which is often what is hanging for me).

Don’t worry if you see the same process more than once (for example, Apache or php may have multiple entries if you run a webserver…this is normal). If you’re using Gnome, you’ll either have to use the console method I explain below or launch the Gnome System Manager to get things rolling. Since I don’t use Gnome, I won’t cover the Gnome System Manager here.

Another way you can do things…especially if all Xwindows (KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, etc) have frozen or are sluggish is to drop to a console. You can do this by killing the Xserver or by dropping to a console. You can press Alt-F2 or Alt-F3 and get directly to a console. Login as root. Now let’s take a look and see what processes are hogging up resources. Kill the Xserver and drop to a console by hitting Control-Alt-Backspace. For our purposes, I’ll assume you’ve made it to the console now.

There’s a quick console way of finding exactly what is consuming the most of your PC as far as processes are concerned. Using the the ‘top’ command will display those processes that are beasts and allow you to take note of them. Look for the process taking up the most CPU% (which should appear at the ‘top’ of your ‘top’ output). Pay specific attention to the PID column of that high CPU% item and make a note of it. This is the process ID number and every program running on a Linux box is assigned one by the Kernel. We’ve found the one making problems for us and have recorded the PID so let’s slay it. Hit Control-C to stop the top command and then type:

kill PID

Where PID is the process ID number you made a note of before. You may not get confirmation that the task has been immediately killed so let’s see if it is still running. We may not get the information we need by using top again since it is mainly for finding the higher consuming processes aka runaways. Instead, let’s use the ps command.

ps aux | more

This command outputs all processes in a nice way…using the | and ‘more’ command allows you to paginate the output so that if there are a TON of processes, you can use the spacebar or arrow keys to page down (you can do that with any command too BTW). Now look for that PID that we just killed in the second column and see if it is there. You could also get creative and use:

 ps aux | grep PID

Where PID is once again the PID you killed. The grep command will search through the results and echo back to you any matching entries it finds. If you didn’t find anything and couldn’t match your PID to that of any displayed in your ps aux command, you just successfully killed that beastly process. As always, for more information, please see the man pages (e.g. man ps or man top).

Hopefully, this allows you to more efficiently manage your processes…runaway or normal. If I’ve printed an error, please let me know via the comments below or if there is a more efficient way of doing things let me know there as well…I’m always open to improvement.

UPDATE: Please checkout the comments section for a few more tips on killing processes!

UPDATE2: Reader Scott M writes in the comments below “You don’t have to use the PID. You can use the -f option. e.g. if there are multiple instance of SomeProgram, you can kill them all with one command:

pkill -9 -f SomeProgram” Thanks Scott!