Today there was a leap second at 23:59:60 UTC. On one of my systems, this caused a high CPU load starting from around 02h00 GMT+2 (which corresponds with the time of the leap second). ksoftirqd and some java (glassfish) process where using lots of CPU time. This system was running Debian Squeeze with kernel 2.6.32-45. [...]
Personally I absolutely do not like the gnome-shell in GNOME 3. I actually even hate it: it is slow, messy and cumbersome to use and I have the feeling that developers are not listening to criticism. Obvious and trivial design bugs which are well known, are totally ignored (bug 662738 is an example). For that [...]
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 [...]