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Showing posts from March 11, 2007
I'm trying to diagnose a performance issue in Foresight Linux, so the output from "cat /proc/interrupts" is: cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 0: 351476 IO-APIC-edge timer 1: 4706 IO-APIC-edge i8042 8: 1 IO-APIC-edge rtc 9: 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi acpi 12: 63789 IO-APIC-edge i8042 15: 12192 IO-APIC-edge ide1 16: 16398 IO-APIC-fasteoi libata, NVidia CK8S 17: 21531 IO-APIC-fasteoi libata, ohci_hcd:usb2 18: 135002 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci_hcd:usb3, eth0 19: 2 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb1 20: 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi snd_ca0106 21: 2 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci1394 22: 124150 IO-APIC-fasteoi eth1, nvidia NMI: 0 LOC: 351565 ERR: 1 MIS: 0
I installed Beryl onto Ubunto 2.10 tonight expecting something resembling OSX's fancy effects. I realise Beryl is in it's early stages but I thought my trusty PC could handle it. Wrong! The performance hit was immense - scrolling a web page felt like my CPU had suddenly been replaced with an 8086 with 512k of memory. The effects are over the top (understandably so until things settle into a usable state), but I think I lasted about 3 minutes before I disabled it and returned to Metacity. Shame. Maybe I'll check back in 2 years.
I started looking at the Django Project , which is a web framework written in Python. While I'm finding overwhelming I'm still impressed by what it offers; I presume it's similar to Ruby on Rails and automates a lot of the initial hard graft. According to the Django tutorials, you can get a working administration front end for a basic poll application in minutes. You don't have to write the admin front end (code or layout) as it's already provided in generic form that you override. Damn impressive! Just thinking of how I could extend my PHP framework to provide this functionality hurts my brain. It's a huge amount of work and I'm wondering why I would even consider continuing with my scripts. I love Python programming and Django (and other frameworks) would be ideal for prototyping some ideas I have. Sooooo.....
I'm a sucker for trying new Linux distributions, so I downloaded the DVD for ( Foresight Linux and installed it. It looks like it's based on Fedora, at least it uses the same installation program. It looks good, and seems to be stable. However it also seems to suffer the same problem that Fedora does on my system; namely speed. For some reason it's slower than other distros, such as Ubuntu. As an example, and this may be down to my system, when there's any reasonable disk activity, or say I'm loading a new page in Firefox, the mouse stutters and the machine is non-responsive. I have a SATA 200Gb drive, so one would assume it's not a hardware issue. I'm starting to think I have something mis-configured inside the box somewhere. The package manager, Conary, seems to have roots in RPM (written by an original developer of RPM) and while I find it faster than RPM and Yum, it definitely seems slower than Ubuntu's apt-get. The package repository is somewhat un