October 27th, 2011 — Android
Three goals drove my decision to the Nook Color:
October 17th, 2011 — Android
While I have an eBook reader on my netbook, I rarely used it. The battery life just made serious reading to difficult, and being tethered to a battery charger made it inconvenient to use. Yet, I had the dream of separating from the world of traditional books. I love books. I love to read. I just wanted them all in one place that was easy to carry, and lasted for hours of reading. The dream started with the Star Trek shows, and became reality with the purchase of and eBook reader.
October 16th, 2011 — Uncategorized
Change was the dominant theme of the past year. Changes the resulted in my now living in Costa Rica, and the systems that I use.
Instead of rehabilitating old laptops, I am now focusing on netbooks, tablets,, and smartphones. Small and mobile now are my major theme. I use my Nokia phone as a WiFi hotspot, my HP mini is my netbook, and the NookColor, which runs Android, is my tablet. Everything is small and mobile.
September 21st, 2010 — Linux Distributions
I am not talking about the soap opera that ran for 54 years, I am talking about the crazy world of open source distributions. OpenSolaris is on its deathbed. Mandriva employees forked a new distro, and openSUSE may be sold to VMware. OpenSolaris problems are not new, but the latter two within the past week, along with the last episode of the long running soap.
September 9th, 2010 — Linux Desktops, Linux Distributions
Another round in the battle between Xfce and LXDE. This time the distro is Linux Mint 9. So far, the Xfce desktop has lost two rounds in a matches with LXDE on the same distro. It has lost both the free memory battle and the quality of distribution battle. On this last round, who is going to be the winner?
September 8th, 2010 — Linux Distributions
Talk about spartan, Lubuntu keeps the desktop totally clean. Does minimal mean more memory? How far does Lubuntu take the minimalist approach?
September 6th, 2010 — Linux Desktops, Linux Distributions
I was going to switch to LXDE on the Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, but clicked the update option in a state of exhaustion. The result was a clean update for openSUSE 11.2 to openSUSE 11.3, but I still have the KDE desktop. Do I restart with a fresh install to get the LXDE desktop, or just work with KDE?
September 6th, 2010 — Linux Distributions
While I was playing with PCLinuxOS LXDE this morning, I ran across this really cool site for choosing a Linux Distribution. The test is fast, and the results are interesting. When I selected RPM as the preferred package format, it recommended openSUSE 11.3 as a best fit. I took the test again, and changed the package format to DEB, Linux Mint 9 was recommended. For the followers of my blog, you know that my number #1 choice is openSUSE followed by Linux Mint 9. Go ahead and take the test, and see what it recommends for you.
September 4th, 2010 — Linux Desktops, Linux Distributions, Linux Installation
Instead of writing two separate posts, I am consolidating my notes into a single post. Besides, the install is identical, as it is just a matter of desktop selection during the install process. Testing various distributions on a multi-boot machine has its problems, and there are always a few gotchas with every distribution. If every thing was perfect, I wouldn’t need to write about it.
August 30th, 2010 — Linux Desktops, Linux Distributions
The search for the perfect kernel scheduler is like searching for the Holy Grail. Linux 2.6 started with the O(1) scheduler, which solved a lot of issues for real-time processes. However, it didn’t scale to large NUMA (non-uniform memory access) machines. The Linux kernel can scale to 4096 processors. Not all the processors have to share the same bus architecture and memory. Rather, a machine could consist of multiple 16 to 24 processor systems connected by a high-speed bus. This is the world of NUMA, as each system has its own memory that can be shared with other systems. The Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) scaled to large NUMA machines, but created problems with systems that had less than 16 cores. CFS also scales well to the high core count of new GPUs (Graphic Processing Unit), which can also run non-graphical processes. For mobile devices with less than 16 cores, it creates problems with heating.
