Intel Atom 230 is a Great Deal for Home Users

It's time for Nettops, after the success of netbooks. Acer Revo and Dell Inspiron Zino are making rounds for sometime now for some obvious reasons - mini form-factor, low power consumption, and the confidence/legacy of netbooks powered by Intel Atom (or VIA Nano).

These days Computer vendors are luring both types of users - power/performance hungry users with Intel core i5 and i7, and dedicated web-users with Intel Atom. I was also lured to Dell showroom to purchase a Zino that came for just Rs. 16000/-. However, the neighboring shop grabbed my attention for quite long with a hoarding "Intel D945GCFL motherboard with Intel Atom 230 embedded for just Rs. 2800". And I started assembling bits and pieces for this mobo. I assembled that mobo with a 160GB SATA HDD, 1GB RAM, LG 16X DVD Writer into a mini-ITX, plus purchased an AOC 16" TFT monitor, an Intex UPS, a Logitech Mouse+Keyboard Combo and a Creative subwoofer sound system. All this for just Rs. 14000/-. A great deal indeed!

First I was apprehensive about the performance of this low-power mini-pc. Blame it on the bad air on the web. There are dozens of forums and tech-sites that dump Intel Atom for its low-performance comparing it with Via Nano. But overall, it's not that bad. Intel Atom 230 nettop processor is 64-bit capable and supports hyperthreading. I tested my self-build pc with Debian and Vista. Performance was satisfactory in both the platforms. Debian Lenny autoconfigured all the devices (thanks the mobo was very mature and little old). Installing Vista Home Premium was also painless, though I had to install device drivers from the CD that came with Intel D945GCFL bundle. Installing device drivers was a one-click-and-go process. There was not a single hitch in running web browsers, office suite, IM clients and browsing local drives.

Of course, it becomes excrusiating slow if you recompile kernel on it or do some video editing. But then, this mobo is meant for everyday home computing. It is quite responsive with Firefox, Skype, Pidgin and OpenOffice running parallelly. If your usage is somewhat limited to these tasks then Intel D945GCFL+Atom 230 is a best buy.

Following are the specs of my mini-pc.

Mepis Plunges into KDE 4 with its 8.5 Alpha Release: Good News for All KDE Fans

Yesterday Warren uploaded SimplyMEPIS 8.4.80, the alpha release of MEPIS 8.5 with KDE 4, commemorating the seventh anniversary of MEPIS Linux. However, Mepis will provide updates to Mepis 8. Warren says, "... a lot of users have asked that we support the KDE 4.3 desktop, yet other users have asked that we continue to support KDE 3.5.10. So in the spirit of our ongoing updates, we are building 8.5, not as a replacement for 8.0, but rather as an alternative for those users who want KDE 4.3. We will continue to support 8.0 with KDE 3.5.10 in parallel with 8.5 and KDE 4.3."

Mepis 8.4.80 alpha defaults to a 2.6.32.rc8 kernel and includes KDE 4.3.2 and QT 4.5.3.

This announcement makes it clear that KDE 4 is finally ready for mass consumption, cos Warren is one among the few distro makers who give maximum priority to stability and usability. Sure, there will be a lot of alphas and betas before Mepis 8.5 goes gold. But then, the wait will be worth it!

For more please read the release announcement.

Google Chrome OS Preview

Yesterday Google raised curtains on its yet to come Chrome OS, the new OS based on Linux and the Chrome browser. Though Chrome OS final will reach users approx. after a year google threw some more hints on how it will look and work.

It's going to be Web OS - the entire system will run in the Chrome browser. The browser is the place that will show up your USB drive contents, Google Apps (Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, and Google Docs among others). It will use an SSD to speed up the system, the rest everything will live in the cloud. So, it's clear that the Google Chrome OS is for those who primarily use the web.

Being a totally opensource project, it's clear that it can be made (by enthusiasts) to run on regular desktops and laptops. Well, wait and watch, there is still a year to go. For more info visit Google Blog.

Linux Kernel Recompilation: Is it Worth the Pain?

With Linux Kernel 2.6.32 around the corners I see some gurus suggesting users to recompile their own kernels for a dozen of reasons: performance, fast booting, support of some esoteric drivers, bla... bla... What's more, the way some persuade for kernel recompilation seems the job is as easy as any point-n-click installation.

Dear users, kernel recompilation is not easy like that. Plus, you won't get that perceivable performance boost. May be after hours of toil you can cut down 2 secs from your boot time and some unnoticeable system responsiveness.

Except for some really weird situations, modern Linux distributions don't really need kernel recompilation. Here are the reasons:

• Rise of Hardware: Gone are those days of Mega Hertz processors. Now when Quad Core processors have reached the shelves you won't find much performance difference between one of your custom (recompiled) kernels and the one that came with your favorite distribution. Of course, you will still see some point differences in actual benchmarks, but that's minismal enough to be ignored. The point here is modern hardware is really fast. For more speed you can just make some manual changes in your runlevels, services and desktop environment settings.
• Intelligent Kernel: A modern linux kernel though multiple times heavier than its predecessors is also far more intelligent than them. It loads just the required stuff and cuts the clutter from beginning. So, no need to be panic looking at those hundreds of modules.
• Can you Bell the Cat well: Recompiling a kernel is not just a make menuconfig >> make >> make modules, and a couple of such commands away. Even if you do it, you as a normal user (sorry, if you are a geek) can't do the job that good compared to hundreds of developers rolling kernel for your favorite distribution.
• Most often you don't need to: Do you know that the upcoming linux kernel 2.6.32 has support for USB 3.0 drives? Just imagine when the hardware is not yet shipped to the vendors the device drivers are ready in linux kernel. The same thing may not be true for all your ultramodern devices. But, it's matter of time. Just wait for some time and next kernel will most probably have it. Else browse through linux forums you will certainly get a fix or workaround.
• Does it Pay: Though recompiling a kernel really helped couple of years back. Today it doesn't really help you that much. You might take all the pains to roll your own kernel. But at the end just get unnoticeable performance boost.

So, is kernel recompilation all that futile? No! The only benefit lies in enhancing your knowledge. If you are intelligent/keen enough to know the system internals kernel recompilation is a great session. Never mind, if you break you system you can pop up a distro cd and go for clean install, always.

RHEL 6: Is Anything Brewing Up?

This time it's really late for Red Hat. It's is going to defy its traditional release cycle pushing RHEL6 further back. People are just throwing guesses as to when the next Red Hat, i.e., Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 6 will come out.

There was a big buzz when Fedora 9 was released, that buzz moved across many Linux blogs and forums when Fedora 10 released. Alas! Now Fedora 12 is about to show up in 2 or 3 days. Still there has been no news of RHEL6's whereabouts - no betas, no feature lists, nothing!

Historically, Red Hat Releases do not seem to follow any schedule. But the releases get delayed over the years as the news releases come in. Let's have a look at the durations between major Red releases.

RHEL 3 -> RHEL 4: 16 months
RHEL 4 -> RHEL 5: 25 months
RHEL 5 -> RHEL 6: ? - 36 months (as of 14th March, 2010) and counting

Add your own guesses on RHEL6's features, put your own release speculations - it seems it will be released when it's ready.

Let me put my first guess: RHEL 6 will be based on Fedora 15, it'll have ext5, xorg 7.9 kernel 2.7.30.. Just joking. Plz post your speculations about RHEL's next big release in this blog based on facts.

Desktop Linux + Idea Net Setter Wireless Internet = A Good Idea

Idea Cellular provides the lowest tariff for mobile internet access through its Net Setter devices. And it promises of plug-n-play zero-cd installation of the devices. However, in reality when you plugin the device on Windows it autoinstalls the modem (Huawei EG162G) drivers and a dialer application. Idea doesn't provides support for Linux. But you can still access internet through Net Setter with the following few steps.

1. Make sure you have ppp and wvdial installed. If not, install both these applications.
2. Add the following lines to your /etc/wvdial.conf file.

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem=/dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 115200
Init 1 = AT+CGMM
Init 2 = AT+CMEE=1
Init 3 = ATE0
Init 4 = AT^HS=0,0
Init 5 = AT+CFUN?
Init 6 = AT+CLCK="SC",2
Init 7 = AT+CPIN?
Init 8 = AT+CLCK="SC",2
Modem Type = USB MODEM
Phone=*99#
Username = phone number (in my case it was 9990146746)
Password = last 4 digits of phone number (in my case it was 6746)
New PPPD = yes
Dial Command=ATDT
Stupid Mode=1
ISDN=0

3. After making the above changes in wvdial.conf plugin Idea Net Setter device, wait for a few seconds, and then run wvdial in a terminal.

Bingo! You are done. You will see wvdial establish a ppp connection in a manner shown below.



But there is a show-stopping bug with the USB Idea Net Setter Stick Modem (Huawei EG162G). I am unable to boot/reboot/shutdown the system with this modem pluged in. I have to plugin this device after the system is booted and plugout the device before a shutdown/reboot.

I would solicit any suggestions to fix this bug.

Important Point:
That show-stopping bug is fixed after install experimental 2.6.32 linux kernel.

Linux is Great But How Does Windows Sit on 90% of Desktops?

Try the latest iterations of major Linux distributions you will know the platform Linux has come a long way. There have been immense development in kernel, desktop integration and opensource application software, all of which together make a Linux operating system that we know. But the big question here is "why do many people still love Windows", why is there such an hue and cry when the latest (and greatest, as they say) Windows 7 hits the stores? And why does Windows sit on more than 90% of desktops? Read on to know my interpretation. No rants or fanboyism!

Linux is not that geeky anymore, thanks to Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Mint and a host of other such desktop distributions! Install the latest PCLinuxOS 2009.2, Mepis 8 or Ubuntu 9.10. Most certainly you won't have any problem installing it. The good part is you will get a complete desktop: an office suite (OpenOffice), an Internet bundle (Firefox, Thunderbird plus an FTP Client, IM client & more), a decent multimedia apps set (Totem, Mplayer, VLC and the likes). So, as a home user you will have very less to look for outside your install disc. And all these are free. Whereas in Windows retail copy installation you have to buy an OS disc, device drivers and other application software. But why there is no such buzz when the latest *buntu reached mirrors? And the market is so up for MS Windows 7?

Simple. The Linux community fails to complement users with those MS comparable software that they have been working on for more than a decade. Take OpenOffice as an example. It's a complete office productivity suite by every aspect. On it you can create stunning presentations, draft elegant letters and resumes, work on spreadsheets. Enough to meet your home use. But it's not a replacement in certain enterprise/professional environments. It behaves like a snail while handling big/complex spreadsheets, macro-ridden large documents, and complex database. Feature-complete, but a poor performer!

Of course, there are some proprietary office suites for Linux such as Softmaker, ElOffice and Ashampoo that look/work like Redmond's. They cost very less compared to MS Office. But they are unknown to the Average Joe.

Likewise, there is no scarcity of apps. There are thousands. However, people are looking for a few solid counterparts of their favorite Windows applications. In this regards Firefox is a real heavy-weight that topples other browsers (IE, Safari....& other) down in all possible ways. Also K3B is very versatile as a CD/DVD burning software. Even it feels and works better than the proprietary NeroLINUX. There is no such case for OpenOffice.

Let's hope OO.org makes performance and polish its primary goal.

Speed Up Debian Linux KDE Desktop

I still remember those days when RedHat 9 used to take almost two minutes to boot on my PIII PC. It was way too slow compared to Windows XP (that took roughly 40 sec) of that time. Thank God, these days Mepis 8 takes just 50 sec on my notebook. And the new OpenOffice.org 3 is a lot better than what it used to be 8 years back.

You too can achieve that speed by doing some easy tweaks.

Speed Up Booting

Boot directly from hard drive, make boot chooser timeout value to 0, and start parallel booting.

Default BIOS setting of modern PC has been set to seek Optical Discs and USB drives first, followed by hard drive and network. You can change it to seek hard drive first save some time. Besides you can set timeout value to 0 in your /boot/grub/menu.lst file so that Linux boot directly instead of waiting few seconds for you to choose a boot option. If yours is a multi-core processor you can still reduce boot time by setting parallel boot. Just edit your /etc/init.d/rc and change CONCURRENCY=none to CONCURRENCY=startpar.

Optimize Memory

Swapping is an important factor in system responsiveness. One important factor improve performance is to swap less and use RAM more. In case of a home desktop, you won't have to use swap if you have more than 1 GB of RAM. But for safety reasons you should have swap partition/file and change default swappiness value. In my system I have edited sysctl.conf file appending a line "vm.swappiness=10" (without quotes) to it.

Optimize KDE

Using auto-login and disabling some KDE eye-candy and services (disabling bootsplash (or splashy), ksplash, gui-effects and system startup check and using less items in Autostart) will further improve your desktop performance. Also you can change KDE options to start with an empty session. It will reduce the KDE-startup time.

Improve Filesystem Performance

Using "noatime" mount option and "data=writeback" mode will speedup your Linux desktop to a great extent.

Use "noatime" option. In my case it is:

# Pluggable devices are handled by uDev, they are not in fstab
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1
/dev/sda2 swap swap sw,pri=1 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
/dev/sda3 /home auto defaults,noatime 1 2
# Dynamic entries below
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0
/dev/hda /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0

Use data=writeback.

In a root terminal issue:

tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/hda1 (substitute hda1 with your partition name)

Disable IPv6

World will move towards IPv6. But not now. Most of the home desktops still access internet using IPv4. So you can disable IPv6 system-wide to save time (processing) that goes to translate between IPv4 and IPv6. Edit /etc/environment as root and append "KDE_NO_IPV6=True" to it. Also remove the ipv6 settings from sysctl.conf. You should also consider disabling IPv6 settings in Firefox. Open about:config in Firefox and change value of "network.dns.disableIPv6" to true.

Change Host Setting

Simply edit /etc/hosts files and change it something like

127.0.0.1 localhost
mepis 127.0.0.1 mepis

(change "mepis" with your hostname)

Optimise TCP Settings

As root user edit /etc/sysctl.conf add the following lines to it:

net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps = 0
net.ipv4.tcp_sack = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save = 1

It will reduce packet transfer overhead and improve your internet speed.

Speedup Firefox

Create a new integer value "content.notify.backoffcount" in about:config and set its value to 5. Also create an integer "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to zero. Similarly create another New Integer, name it Network.dnsCacheExpiration and give its value as 3600. Create another integer ui.submenuDelay and then set its value to zero. Change the network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining values to "true".

Remove Java

You should also consider removing Java runtime and allied packages from your Linux desktop and uncheck "java" from OpenOffice.org and Firefox options. It will speed up loadtime of both the applications.

Home Users Don't Need to Update their Linux Frequently

There are certain Linux distributions, those so called rolling distros, generally don't break after you update regularly. But some bleeding edge distributions (like Fedora) break or behave badly. Good thing is, if you are running Linux on a home desktop, you don't need to update it frequently.

You can update Linux same way as you did on Windows. Either you choose regular updates, or you pull in the bulk updates following the said distro's systematic instructions for update. But very often the later is recommended for desktops. Regular update (those related to security bug fixes, performance enhancements) is a must if you are running some critical applications on server.

Suppose, you installed PCLinuxOS 2009.2 which detected and configured all your hardware devices. You did a full update plus pulled in all the necessary apps of your choice. Period. You don't need to regularly upgrade it. Frequent updates don't bring about great improvements. They only kill bandwidth, your time, some extra power and memory. You don't need to keep that "Fetch Updates" (or something similar) apps running in your system tray. It just consumes some extra CPU and RAM. If your system works don't break it - don't pull in unnecessary upgrades!

Stick to your distro of choice and make a clean install when a mega release shows up.

Sify Broadband Annoyance on Linux

Some Internet Service Providers don't grow with time. Needless to say they fall apart. Sify Broadband (in India) is one such ISP. Even it lags behind MTNL in terms of technological awareness. Please read on if you are interested in further rant about Sify.

Due to some compulsion I had to subscribe Sify Broadband. And I contacted the local Sify Internet Agency (Annoyance No.1: this ISP does not provide internet direct to the consumer, there is always an agent who takes a good amount of service charge every month, alas!). The Sify agent of my locality is a total noob. He had no idea about IP configuration on Linux. Well, I configured it as per his given details.

I got connected to Sify LAN. But could I browse the web? No. (Annoyance No.2: You have to install a certain Sify Connect app). Instead, every page were redirected to a Sify server page that prompted me to install a Sify dialer. I chose to download the linux dialer (from something like http://210.18.11.199:81/bbandclient/...1.3-bin.tar.gz). Extracted the tarball and ran an install.sh file. The dialer was installed successfully. But did that run? No. (Annoyance No.3: On running that dialer it prompted that libssl.so.4 was missing). Bullshit! It displayed some error message stating libssl.so.4 and libcrypto.so.4 were missing, whereas both were present though their version numbers were different. Not a big deal, I made symlinks to those required files from the versions that existed in my /usr/lib.

su
cd /usr/lib
ln -s libssl.so.0.9.8 libssl.so.4
ln -s libcrypto.so.0.9.8 libcrypto.so.4

After the above dirty commands I ran sifyconnect as a non-privileged user. It did not work. (Annoyance No. 4: you've to be root user in order to run that sifyconnect dialer). Then I again issued "su" followed by sifyconnect. It worked. Sify Sucks Big! Phie on the Sify Broadband dialer developers who think it is necessary to have admin/root privileges to run that BS TCP/IP sifyconnect dialer. Well, no relief thereafter. I never saw persistent connectivy in Sify. There have been frequent "invalid sessions" and "autologout". I had to login every now and then.

The last and biggest annoyance is that Sify charges much more than that of Airtel or MTNL for comparable bandwidth. No wonder, it has always been the last resort for consumers. Grow up Sify competition is getting stronger!

Anyways, I am switching to MTNL.