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Ximian Gnome 1.4 released
A zillion people took time out of their busy day to submit that Ximian 1.4 is out. Now it includes nautilus (which I continue to be lukewarm on. It likes to barf on huge directories, and I prefer efm's integrated command line) as well as Mozilla (which is good to see included with the distribution although again, I think I prefer konqueror). But the Ximian desktop is super solid and great for beginners, and includes lots of useful stuff. I'll be apt-get'ing the latest revision asap.
My guess is that with your change things appear faster, but in the end you've actually hurt your overall throughput (the amount of computational work you actually get done in a given time).
You have hurt your throughput (HZ = 100 is a server-side optimization, really), but by how much? The default HZ used to be 1000 (or maybe 1024?) even on Intel processors; I forget exactly when they made the change, but I think it was during 2.1.xx. And that was during Pentium 100 days. I don't think you'll notice the extra scheduling cycles on a gigahertz Athlon.
The new apt source is:
http://red-carpet.ximian.com/debian potato main
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Ian Peters
Another method of making X seem more responsive that doesn't involve playing with the scheduler (which is not something that Ximian or anyone else should be suggesting) is to run X with a -10 nice value. Renicing X to -10, however, should only be done on a desktop system, on a server it will starve the background stuff from CPU time.
That's what I do on my desktop machine and it really does make X feel more responsive.
If one knew the Latin language, he would know your news not to be deep.
Farewell,
Ambrosius.
Always thinking, always fascinated.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
My guess is that with your change things appear faster, but in the end you've actually hurt your overall throughput (the amount of computational work you actually get done in a given time).
You almost got that one right. IIRC, increasing the time slice increases throughput, the price you pay is increased latency.
You also have failed to realize that perception is reality. If it seems faster, then it IS faster.
From the go-gnome installer:
http://a1220.g.akamai.net/7/1220/1405/2001042323 27 52/red-carpet.ximian.com/installers/installer-redh at-62-i386.gz (1664K)
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
There are a lot of tradeoffs in cbanging the standard timeslice...
Make it too small, and you are dominated by the overhead of switching between tasks (not a small amount of work... have to push all registers to the stack, swap stacks, and grab all old registers).
Make it too large and average response time is hurt.
My guess is that with your change things appear faster, but in the end you've actually hurt your overall throughput (the amount of computational work you actually get done in a given time).
I bet other people can give you a better explanation, the OS class here at the University of Arizona is shit....
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Recently, I was writing an application in Java that used small Thread.sleep(). It was appearing to sleep _way_ too long though. Thread.sleep(0,1) (one nanosecond) would sleep the same as Thread.sleep(10) (10 milliseconds). I began to think of why this might be.. and then it hit me.. it's the context switching. So I looked around and found some sites talking about real-time audio and changing the context switching speed.
/usr/src/linux/include/asm-i386/param.h file to #define HZ 1000 rather than #define HZ 100 everything GUI was _much_ _much_ faster. The GIMP seems to load in literally 1/5 the time.
I found if you change the
Why don't distribuations like Ximian suggest this change? With heavily multi-threaded gui applications it seems to me it's an absolute must. Everything seems to run better to me with the faster context switching. (well, except for remote X, with the fast switching it seems to update a lot faster, and thus clog the connection and make it seem slow).
Anyone know why this is not more heavily publicized?
Ian
I'm currently in the process of downloading their "Red Carpet" installer, which looks to me like I am now stuck with using this stupid GUI package tool thingie to manage my debian packages instead of the much preferred (to me) command-line 'apt-get' tool.
Can anyone say for sure one way or the other who's already done this with Debian?
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Linuxconf needs a lot of help. Linuxconf is probably the most important thing Linux has, because it makes the OS accessable to the neophyte. And right now, it sucks ass. It takes too long to do anything, freezes, and often never makes the changes it claims to have. It is incapable of configuring X, and given that Linux needs to make serious inroads on the desktop to keep growing, the lack of such a feature is inexcusable.
Every Linux vendor out there should have at least one programmer working on Linuxconf full time. They should be working on stuff that goes into the base code, no hacking it up to produce distro-specific stuff.
I guarantee you that once Linuxconf does what is can now more reliably, and also handles X configurations, Linux use will explode. Until then, we will just see Linux stagnate as the choice of geeks.
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E2 IN2 IE?
It was already ZDNetted, linuxtodayed and newsforged!!!
Indeed, why should Slashdot get the sole honor of bringing servers to their knees? :-)
-Karl
P.S. Haven't you just contradicted your username? ;-)
For the umpteenth time, Ximian doesn't hate Slackware, and is not biased against Slackware.
There are two major reasons Ximian GNOME isn't build for Slackware:
1) Slackware does not support internal dependency checking or management, and the rpm bolt-on is not sufficient for Red Carpet. We have spoken with the Slackware maintainers and they feel that users should know their own dependency trees and maintain them. Any user who cannot sort out library versions for him or herself does not deserve root privs, they say.
2) Slackware users are not the Ximian GNOME target market. Slackware users are frequently console users, compilers-from-scratch, and knowers of their own dependency trees.This is excellent for them. They don't need Ximian GNOME, so we're not really there for them.
If you want Ximian GNOME in Slackware, talk to the Slack maintainers and ask them to port it.
You can see a longer explanation, and install tips, at my unofficial Ximian GNOME on Slack page at http://primates.ximian.com/~aaron/slack.html
Sincerely,
Aaron Weber
Technical Writer
Ximian, Inc.
I just wish that GNOME and KDE would include XFree86 configuration utilities (like DrakConf for Mandrake does, only a bit cleaner). In addition, they should make a bigger deal of the latest version of linuxconf, which seems to be the most comprehensive hardware and service control. I still use netcfg by RedHat sometimes to set up Gateway and DNS info.
My point here is, these application sets (KDE and GNOME) have been focusing almost entirely on configuration utilities for the GUI. The GNOME and KDE control-panels are useful only for changing simple things like backgrounds, themes, and keyboard shortcuts. If I were new to Linux, I'd be looking to these control panels to modify my screen resolution, set up my network (and network hardware), set up my sound card (I still use sndconfig sometimes), and other devices. A new user expects all system configuration to be in one place, like the Windows control panel. This was my experience when I first started using Linux about two years ago, and I had to do a fair amount of searching to find all of these little useful utilities (as well as editing config files manually) - like netcfg, sndconfig, Xconfigurator, linuxconf, etc. If nothing else, GNOME and KDE should include links and info about how and what to use to do these things.
I may be incorrect on a few points and simply missed how KDE and/or GNOME handle a feature - in that case, I'd like to know. However, it's been my experience that GNOME and KDE can't be truly newbie-friendly without the ability to easily change hardware (and service) settings.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh
I just tried this - you need to be the superuser, and it failed the first time, but it actually worked, when the graphical update tool did not. Very fast, as well - the Akamai downloads ran at about 70kbps.
Why [don't] the developers find something better to copy from? Say, Mac OS.
Because every time a Linux developer tries, Slashdot has to run a story called "Another Apple Cease-and-Desist."
Anyway, how different can you really get from either when you're stuck with concepts like widgets, buttons, titlebars, windows, etc. -- and if you throw these out -- some paradigm for computing sans windows or buttons, for example -- who's going to use it?
Certainly not end-users. If you don't give them a "Start" menu at this point, they're not going to get it. If you don't give them a window and a title bar, they certainly won't.
I know, I know. We don't want Linux to be used. Only studied by the technically curious. And we don't care about Apple and it's copyrights. Anarchy! Anarchy! Down with the end-users! Down with the corporations! Rah! Rah! Rah!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW