As mentioned over on I’ Been to Ubunutu:
The only netbook running Linux on Amazon’s Top 25 Netbooks list is the EEE 901, sitting at #19. The war is over, folks.
Two thoughts on this:
- If netbooks drifting towards laptops in terms of usage and cost, does the moniker mean much anymore?
- XP is familiar territory for a lot of computer users. It is hard to imagine a Windows being faster and better than XP on low-spec (true netbook) computers.
I was actually shopping for a Linux netbook recently and was a bit shocked to realise that even ASUS seemed to have switched everything from Linux to XP. Virus scanning slowdown and power consumption is one big reason I would be reluctant to have an XP netbook. That and the importance of installing software updates every week or so.
Nigel Stewart Linux, Tech Linux, netbook, xp
35 Free High-Quality Games for Linux – a list of 35 high-quality, well-working games that will run smoothly on Linux.
Nigel Stewart Linux games, Linux
Minimise latency due to swapping:
# echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
Maximise available memory by swapping:
# echo 100 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
The Fedora 8 (Werewolf) default appears to be 60.
See also:
KernelTrap
What Is the Linux Kernel Parameter vm.swappiness?
Maximize Desktop Speed
Nigel Stewart Linux kernel, Linux, swappiness, tweaking
I’ve been using stricmp() for a long long time but this is the first time I found there’s no stricmp() in Linux.
Maintaining cross-portability of C code can be frustrated by the occasional mismatch of Win32 and POSIX APIs. On Linux there is no stricmp, but there is strncasecmp reportedly conforming to 4.4BSD and POSIX.1-2001.
In some places stricmp is reported to be ANSI, but I didn’t find any mention of it in ISO/IEC 9899:TC2 the C99 specification. It just seems that Microsoft added it as a vendor extension, but mistakenly documented it as being ANSI and/or POSIX.
A recommended solution is to #define strncasecmp stricmp for Windows builds.
Nigel Stewart Linux, Tech ANSI, C, ISO, Linux, stricmp, strncasecmp, Windows
I came across a Coby MP705 at my local Frys electronics store. It features MP3 and OGG audio and XVID AVI video at 220×176 @30fps.
There is one configuration setting necessary for the player to happily talk to Ubuntu 8.04 Linux over USB:
Setup -> System -> USB Mode -> MSC
I had success converting MPEG and AVI video files using the Avidemux software available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. I used 160kbps for audio and 1000kps for video.
Reviews:
To-do list:
- Sync podcasts from Amarok
- Built-in encoding profile for Coby MP705 in Avidemux
Diagnostics:
$ sudo lsusb
Bus 002 Device 012: ID 10d6:1101 Actions Semiconductor Co., Ltd
…
$ sudo tail -f /var/log/messages
… kernel: [5763298.121007] usb 2-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 12
… kernel: [5763298.254409] usb 2-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
… kernel: [5763298.286317] scsi15 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
… kernel: [3200583.185711] scsi 15:0:0:0: Direct-Access GENERIC USB DISK DEVICE 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
Nigel Stewart Linux, Tech avi, coby, Linux, mp3, ogg, portable player
[C++] Linking libstdc++ statically.
Making C++ binaries that will work properly in different Linux distributions is somewhat painful. The problem is not so much linking libstdc++ statically – it is just a library, after all – but the runtime support required by C++ code in general, to enable features like RTTI and exception handling.
Nigel Stewart Linux, Tech gcc, Linux
Jason Schonberg will show some basic features of the GNU Debugger at the October 16th talk. Core dumps and their common causes will be examined and discussed. GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows you to see what is going on `inside’ another program while it executes — or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed. As described at the GNU Debugger website (http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/), GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:
- Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
- Make your program stop on specified conditions.
- Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
- Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.
The GNU debugger supports the languages found in the Gnu Compiler Collection. These include Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Pascal (and many others). GDB can run on most popular UNIX and Microsoft Windows variants. Digital copies of the first chapter of “The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse” will be available. As usual, questions can be asked during and after the talk.
Nigel Stewart Linux, Tech Austin, development, gdb, Linux
John Terpstra, a Linux developer with a long and interesting history in the field, and a perspective on the past and future course of Linux. He is perhaps best known as the co-founder of the Samba project, and has written a couple of books on it.
The presentation will occur at the regular ALG meeting on August 28 at 625E 10th St, Austin TX
Presentation slides in PDF format.
Nigel Stewart Linux, Tech ALG, Linux
It might finally be time to retire our trusty (but sometimes buggy) Motorola 360s. They’re out of contract and out of warranty.
One new option is the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner GSM – which ought to talk happily to both T-Mobile in the USA, and Telstra or Optus in Australia. Wifi and bluetooth are supported. The entire software stack is open-source, which means we can run any software and services we like – rather than whatever junk T-Mobile deems profitable.
My main question at this point is if it supports Qt as well as GTK?
Nigel Stewart Linux, Tech gsm, Linux, open source, phone
