Category Archives: Linux

Linux and Open Source

Bonnie++ Results for XFS on Dell E4200 SSD

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I’ve been playing with my new work laptop, a Dell E4200 (which I chose as I wanted something light) and thought I’d run Bonnie++ on my XFS /home partition on the SSD (a “SAMSUNG SSD Thin uSATA 128GB M” according to dmesg) to see how it compares to spinning disk. Here’s the results with Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10):

Version 1.03c       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
sys26            2G           68551  27 38896  23           90404  30  1356   6
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16   556   8 +++++ +++   679   7   605   8 +++++ +++   442   5
sys26,2G,,,68551,27,38896,23,,,90404,30,1355.6,6,16,556,8,+++++,+++,679,7,605,8,+++++,+++,442,5

real    3m56.775s
user    0m0.580s
sys     0m36.930s

So comparing with some old results on my home desktop system seems to show that the block I/O numbers are better, but the file manipulation stuff is much worse! Once I can get btrfs on here I’ll have to try again. 😉

OpenMoko in Search of X11 Driver Developers for Glamo

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The graphics hardware in the Neo Freerunner (Glamo) is missing support for some of its 3D support, and so the OpenMoko folks are looking for developers who can help them out with this:

Having said that, if someone wants to seriously develop for the glamo, please get in touch with me and we will find a legally correct way to extend the smedia documentation to you.
In fact we have done that in a few cases before already, but I’m not sure how much actual codes have come out of that. I think very little 😉 So we need some really serious coders that don’t mind a tough challenge.

Looks like another person to contact might be Graeme Gregory:

Over the next few weeks I shall be working on Xglamo to bring it into the Xorg family of drivers. If people come up with interesting patches while I am working on this I can certainly give them a tryout.

Patent Trolls Attack OpenMoko Project

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It appears that the patent trolls Sisvel are attacking the OpenMoko project, and as part of their strategy the project has chosen to pull all of their downloads whilst they remove any support for MP2 and MP3 files.

The short story is that we are in a protracted battle with some patent trolls. Google for Sisvel. In order to get ourselves in a stronger position, we want to make sure no copies/instances/whatever of patent-infested technologies like MP2 and MP3 exist on our servers. Our phones never shipped with end-user MP3 playback features, but we want to use this opportunity to make sure it’s not even in some remote place somewhere.

As Sisvel aren’t the only ones to sue over MPEG related patents (( note that Microsoft won on appeal very recently, reversing the decision )) it really does bring the message home that MPEG is not a safe technology for audio files and that things like Ogg-Vorbis and FLAC are far better (and safer!) choices in the long run.

Android Copies What You Type…

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…not in a malicious way, but in a rather amusing and potentially destructive one.. 🙂

It seems as though there is a /system/sbin/sh running in the background with
/dev/console as stdin. That could explain why typing “reboot” and then enter (in
ConnectBot or otherwise) will reboot your phone. If you type “telnetd”, telnet into
your phone, and look at the /proc/XX/fd tree for the /system/sbin/sh process, you can
see it clearly.

Until you’ve grabbed the RC30 update that fixes this it’s probably best not to do much sysadmin work from one, especially if that involves rm -rf foo.. 😉 This was via LWN, which has the priceless comment:

I wonder how many android phones were running at half speed after someone replied “yes” to someone…

🙂

Technology predictions

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I’ll add three to the ones that Stewart just posted:

  • Two years: The distinction between laptops, netbooks and mobile phones will get even more blurred with consumers demanding mobiles with more power and lighter and lighter laptops/netbooks;
  • Two years: Tivolised/Androidised Linux mobiles will grow, but there will be a few more open Linux phones around (mainly due to the convergence of mobiles, laptops and netbooks);
  • Five years: Peak oil will start to affect pricing of consumer electronics directly through raw materials.

XVideo on VGA laptop output with radeon driver

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I’ve been doing a lot of playing with MythTV using Mythbuntu. One of the nice things it supports is diskless booting of frontend systems so I thought I’d try it out on my old laptop. It worked quite nicely until I was about to start displaying any video through the VGA output to our TV, then you’d get a blue screen rather than the video but the video would display quite nicely on the laptops own display. Needless to say that was pretty suboptimal. 😉

The reason that happens is that with the free ATI Radeon driver in Ubuntu the XVideo overlay is assigned to the first display (the built in LCD) even if you’ve disabled it through the XRandR config in your xorg.conf file. I tried a lot of mucking around with various Xorg settings and got nowhere until I stumbled across the rather simple solution!

The xvattr package is in Universe in Ubuntu and I make it happen each time by putting the command into the /etc/mythtv/session-settings file (just can just create it if it doesn’t exist, it just gets sourced by the mythfrontend command on startup).

Sadly I don’t think I’m going to be able to use the laptop after all because it doesn’t have line out, just headphones, and that doesn’t appear to be enough for my amp. 🙁

No Ubuntu Linux Dell Inspiron Mini 9 for Australia :-(

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At work we’ve been interested in the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (Dell’s answer to the eeePC), especially as everywhere you go you’ll read about it being shipped with Ubuntu Linux, which was great news.

Unfortunately I’m sad to say that my sources in Dell have told me that it’s only going to be available in Australia with Windows XP, no Linux version for Australia. 🙁