The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on March 31, 2008

For those of you don't know, I have three major hobbies:
- Gaming
- Hackery things
- Shooting goodness

These three things ebb and flow. I spent a lot of the past year doing none of them (buying the house and all), and the year prior to that was a lot of shooting and not as much of the others. Now the balance is coming back, and I am gaming again and am moved to play with more computer bits.

To that end:

(1) I have been playing with various non Linux OS's. I will post about this separately.

(2) I have finally dug out the Toshiba Magnia SG20 which I sortof inherited. See, my brother in law bought 2, one for him and one for my in laws. The idea was that it would allow him to do a pile of nifty things which were a problem given that the in laws only had dialup (he could initiate connections, etc.). Since the Magnia was essentially a Linux box with a modem, ethernet switch, etc. in it, it made sense. Of course, about a year later, my in laws' street got wired for cable, so they didn't need this device anymore. Thus, I got it. It's a slick little piece of kit. There are some photos here but the site isn't in english. It comes with 128MB ram, but takes PC133, so I ordered some off ebay. (I needed some for the Mini-ITX board too, so it works out – combined shipping and all that). I've gotten it to boot with a spare video card that I had, and will likely install Ubuntu JeOS and get it to a point where SSH is up and it is using a static IP. Once that is done, I will… do something with it. I don't know exactly what. One thought is to use the internal switch to act as the main server on a SAN (which does the bridging to the main network, access control, etc.). The real problem is that it would need disks which are connected via Ethernet, and those can get pricey (but are getting cheaper)

(3) I've also been playing with Ubuntu Hardy beta. Initial impressions are very good. In this, there have been some items of note:

(i) The relatime option has been introduced. This happened awhile ago, but it is new to me, so I will be using it. It is described here. In a nutshell, it only updates the access time of a file if the access time is less than the write time. This preserves compatibility with some applications which expect this behavior, but doesn't need to do this every time you hit the file, thus presenting a huge performance increase. Since my processes seem to be becoming more and more I/O bound recently, this would be very nice.

(ii) The alternate install CD includes partitioning options for LVM, LVM + RAID, and encrypted LVM. This is nice. Unlike the debian installer, this didn't get all horked up and crash when I was testing it.

(iii) I did some more thinking on my choice of distros. I like *ubuntu, and had been using straight Ubuntu and then installing a pantload of crap in pursuit of some foolish idea of having a system with lots of things installed so that anyone who sits down to use it will have what they want. This is silly, since it doesn't really work this way. Folks don't tend to come over and use my computers – they bring their own. Eventually, we're going to add a specific guest computer. Either way, it's not really useful to have all the crap installed. So, I'm going to just install Xubuntu and then add the specific apps which I actually use, and not worry about the rest.

(iv) In the same vein, I'm going to purge all the old user accounts from people in college (guest accounts, backups, etc.) and all the associated data, and only create accounts for Liz and I plus likely a guest account (not guest/guest, how retarded do you think I am?)

(v) And finally, I'm going to go through my home directory and clean out many of the dotfiles (with the likely exception of the subversion, firefox and thunderbird directories). See, this is the problem when you run Linux – it's so stable that you end up with stuff sticking around forever, so I have config files dating back to June of 2001. Back then, I think I was running some old version of RedHat. At best, these are benign – programs you installed, ran once, and then you uninstalled, or are otherwise not used. At worst, they are poorly migrated to the new version, or otherwise have some goofy bit of cruft which is making the program slightly confused. This seems to especially be true of Gnome and KDE apps, since the configuration schemes for those have changed a lot in this time period. I suspect that this may have something to do with the instability I've seen in some apps in Gutsy – other folks report no problems at all.

Finally, since it is now spring, I will be going back to getting up an hour earlier in the mornings. I was doing that for most of last summer and fall, but it petered out come winter because it is just too easy to stay in bed for another hour. Now that it is getting warmer and (more importantly) light out earlier, it is easier to get up. So, expect to see more blog entries about things as I have a chance to play with them.

Oh, and I start firefighter training tomorrow. 100 hours over 3 months. I can't say I'm overjoyed at the time commitment, but the course should prove to be interesting.

Category: LJ Import
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