After my previous post, I investigated a bit further by changing one single compilation option as a reader suggested. Instead of running “make“, I ran “make -j 3” to run 3 compilation threads in parallel on my Core 2 Duo system. The results are quite surprising…
First of all, I ran my previous benchmarks again and the results were confirmed with a 17% gain for the NOOP scheduler. Then things got bad 
As you have probably read, I bought a new laptop with an SSD drive recently, a Lenovo x301. Today I opened my SSD to see what’s inside and it turns out Lenovo is using quality drives. They are manufactured by Samsung, which use a decent I/O controller and cache memory contrary to the cheap drives you can buy these days which use lousy JMicron JMF602 controllers (Like the OCZ Core series). I started to wonder if I could gain even more performance…
SSD drive from a Lenovo x301
If you have a laptop, you probably have a TouchPad which is driven by the “synaptics” driver. To configure your TouchPad, you probably always used the GSynaptics utility, right? This utility required to modify your xorg.conf, but we don’t have this file in Fedora 10 anymore…so what now?
There has been quite some time since the last Fedora port to the Alpha architecture with a working Gnome environment was published, and the next iteration is still in the works. So I figured it was time to give Gentoo a try, a distribution I didn’t touch for years.
For those of you totally unfamiliar with Gentoo, you basically:
The installation from source packages is still a scary but fun concept to me. On the positive side, it lets you compile every software to take advantage of your CPU’s specificity. On the downside, it took 36h on a 667MHz EV67 CPU (I’m not joking) to compile a working Gnome environment. It’s looooooooong, especially with a noisy machine like the XP1000.
Note that Gentoo’s documentation is REALLY nice and well written, and I also got some support on the #alpha IRC channel, where the Fedora on alpha guys also live (thanks for your nice work, Oliver and Jay).
Gnome 2.22 running on an Alpha, Gentoo 2008.0
Oh, and Merry Christmas for all you Christians out there
A cool feature in iTunes is the ability to share your entire music library over the network, but few people know that the exact same thing is built into Fedora, and you can activate it in 1 minute. iTunes is using a protocol called DAAP (Digital Audio Access Protocol) for that, which is also available as a standard plugin for Rhythmbox.
To activate music sharing:
Done, now your music is shared across your network, and you can even see it in iTunes.
If you prefer to install NetBeans 6.5 directly from netbeans.org instead of NetBeans 6.1 packaged in Fedora 10 (if you need GlassFish for example), you may encounter a rather annoying bug: it’s impossible to type the {} signs on some keyboard layouts.
I don’t exactly know what it’s related to, but it’s a known issue at Ubuntu and there is a simple temporary fix available. It seems to happen on non-US keyboards only and I have no idea what this “XMODIFIERS=” ./netbeans” parameter does. Should I file a bugreport somewhere?
The final version of NetBeans 6.5 is out, you can grab it on http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html
It can be installed in your home directory on F9/10 without problems, it doesn’t taint your system in any way. You may wonder why I don’t use NetBeans 6.1 packaged in Fedora 10? I simply need the EE version with the GlassFish server.
Finally, Adobe released an x86-64 version of Flash 10. It’s still beta, grab it on http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
Last week, I was ranting about the Dell Mini 12 which is based on the Poulsbo architecture, with a Linux incompatible GMA 500 GPU. It turns out that the folks at dell Dell are smart : they are using an Intel GMA 900 instead, which is fully compatible with Linux.
Still, it only has 1GB of RAM, non-upgradable 
NOTE: it is in fact an incompatible GMA500, the GMA900 reference was a mistake on dell’s french website!
No, I’m not talking about the city of Poulsbo in Washington State. I’m talking about the low power Intel chipset for the Atom platform that is consuming 5W instead of the 25W the 945GC (22W) + ICH7 (3W) couple used in most Atom platforms is consuming.
So, the US15W System Controller Hub finally made its way to a consumer product, the Dell Inspiron Mini 12 netbook (not the Mini 9, this one is still using the i945). Great you may think, but don’t get excited too quickly…with the US15W comes a news graphic chip: the Intel GMA 500.
This chip isn’t an Intel development, it was licensed from PowerVR and there is a huge issue with that: as far as I can tell, it doesn’t use the same Intel graphic drivers you can find in the Linux Kernel. Basically, you can’t use the Inspiron Mini 12 with Linux yet, which is a huge drawback. We’re pretty much fucked until Tungsten Graphics comes up with a new driver, I don’t even know if they were mandated by Intel for this one.
A discussion about this issue in French: http://forum.canardpc.com/showthread.php?t=30544