Frederik's Blog

Recently I installed a server with a Supermicro SMC2108 RAID adapter, which is actually a LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260. LSI created a command line utility called MegaCLI for Linux to manage this adapter. You can download it from their support pages. The downloaded archive contains an RPM file. I installed mc and rpm on Debian [...]

Today I was getting this error when installing a new kernel on a server running Debian: /usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: Couldn’t find PV pv2. Check your device.map. The error can be reproduce by running the update-grub command. The day before, a new RAID disk was added to this server, so I suspected this could be the cause. [...]

Two years ago I wrote an article presenting some Linux performance improvements. These performance improvements are still valid, but it is time to talk about some new improvements available. As I am using Debian now, I will focus on that distribution, but you should be able to easily implement these things on other distributions too. [...]

Some news about GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell: The minimize and maximize window decoration buttons are now removed. It is estimated that these buttons are not useful actually, and users should be using Alt-Tab, the dock or different workspaces to switch between different applications, and maximize windows by double clicking on the title bar. As [...]

Now that I am on the subject of improving performance, I configured some performance improvements for a Mediawiki installation here: Make sure you run the latest Mediawiki version. Mediawiki 1.16 introduced a new localisation caching system which is supposed to improve performance, so you definitely want this to get the best performance. Create a directory [...]

Today I analyzed disk reads and writes on a server with iotop and strace and found some interesting possible optimizations. With iotop you can check which processes are reading and writing from the disks. I always press the o, p and a keys in iotop so that it only shows me processes doing I/O and [...]

After my disappointment with the current GNOME 3.0 development version with GNOME Shell, I thought it would be interesting to compare it with Ubuntu’s Unity. Ubuntu has just published a new alpha version of what will become Ubuntu 11.04, so I used that for a quick test. On the positive side: On the dock on [...]

Yesterday Fedora held a GNOME 3 test day. In order to facilitate testing, they published a Rawhide live CD containing the latest builds of GNOME 3. This is a great opportunity to test the latest GNOME-shell and other new things without having to upgrade your system to unstable alpha stuff. I tried it out on [...]

Since this afternoon, this server is now running Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze. Just like the previous system, this is a KVM virtual machine running on a HP Proliant DL185G5 host. The host server has always been running Debian. This was my last production system still running Mandriva. I might have forgotten to move over a few [...]

In spite of the fact that Mandriva has decided on its shareholder’s meeting to publish new release 2011 at the end of the first half of 2011 and to improve its communication towards the community, one can safely say that both the distribution and the company do not have any realistic future anymore. A bunch [...]