Computing

The power consumption on the Linux kernel 3.10 is pretty bad.

On kernel 3.10, with the follwing config, the PowerTop results are:

#

# Timers subsystem

#

CONFIG_TICK_ONESHOT=y

CONFIG_NO_HZ_COMMON=y

# CONFIG_HZ_PERIODIC is not set

CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE=y

# CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL is not set

CONFIG_NO_HZ=y

CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS=y

PowerTOP v2.0 Overview Idle stats Frequency stats Device stats Tunables

The battery reports a discharge rate of 28.0 W

The estimated remaining time is 23 minutes

Summary: 1785.5 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/second, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 22.1% CPU use

As someone who learned computers on his own, I always acknowledged the value that the Free Software movement has brought. The accessibility of these topics, which are only supposed to be part of text books and schools, is available for anyone and everyone who has the resource and passion to do it.

But this past week, 2 things made me pretty impressed with the maturity and quality of work that we do.

It is still 2012 in this part of the world and the world is still intact. Since nothing major happened, I thought of spending the new gifted time to add a long pending item to apt-offline. As shown in the screen shots, apt- offline’s GUI now has support to detect and display the downloaded offline bug reports.

This is part of the just released, version 1.3.

Hello World. This is the follow-up to the last [2](http://blog/report-bugs- with-apport) updates on the state of apport in Debian.

A lot has changed since the last update on Apport. Currently, in Experimental, we have version 2.6.1-2. With this version, and going forward, there will be no hacks to make it work for Debian. Thanks to Martin Pitt, with his assistance, Apport now has a very basic crashdb in place for Debian. The Debian crashdb provides Apport the interface to interact with the Debian BTS.

Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.61, has been released and will land up soon for Debian. This is the version that would be targetting Wheezy.
This release includes many bug fixes and should make power savings much better on your machines.

This is mainly a bug fix release. Some parallel module execution approach has been used which could show runtime improvements.

Changelog:

1.61 - Thu May 17 17:44:26 IST 2012
* Handle devices with persistent device naming. This fixes the issues where
you don’t have a disk referenced by a block name, the commit= value was
completely skipped
* Fix issue where hdparm skips SSDs for power management
* Add parallel execution for the modules. In theory this should speeden up the
execution. See git commit log comments for details
* Add support for non-deafult customized settings
* calculate design_capacity_warning on machines/arches where it is not readily
available

I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1 TB hard drive. It is a 2.5" compact disk that you connect over USB. It draws its power from the USB controller. My previous Extern HDDs were all 2.5" laptop drives, for which I bought a USB enclosure. Those devices always worked perfect, as in:

• They were automatically detected
• Partitions/File Systems understood
• Desktop systems would prompt for actions

The typical kernel messages I got for these devices were:

OpenXenManager cleared the NEW queue and is now available in the archive.

What it is:

rrs@champaran:~$ apt-cache show openxenmanager Package: openxenmanagerVersion: 0.r80+dfsg-1Installed-Size: 3051Maintainer: Ritesh Raj Sarraf rrs@debian.orgArchitecture: allDepends: pythonDescription: full-featured graphical management tool for xen using xenapi OpenXenManager is a graphical interface to manage XenServer / Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) hosts through the network . OpenXenManager is an open-source multiplatform clone of XenCenter (Citrix)Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxenmanager/Section: adminPriority: extraFilename: pool/main/o/openxenmanager/openxenmanager_0.r80+dfsg- 1_all.debSize: 396322MD5sum: 64df482dac6b99bc3403bcc0740f8718SHA1: 9c746f524c3c29eb88de7ae702c96cbca162f577SHA256: 454641eb26c57ba35ad573a3a8493ac6dbd82f7920c8b926049ef892724147e0

A copy of this article is also available here

This article is about Offline Package Management in Debian. Debian is a pretty well known project. One of the things that makes Debian very popular is APT (a.k.a Advanced Packaging Tool) which allows remote package downloads, upgrades and dependency resolution. Unfortunately it does require a network connection - unless you use apt-offline.

So this is the 2nd time I ran into a problem like this again. My FAT32 file system on the external USB HDD, all of a sudden, started reporting:

00:47:32 rrs@champaran:/tmp$ sudo dosfsck /dev/sdb1dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32, LFNLogical sector size is zero.

I had been taking a lot of care to ensure that I don’t run into situation like this. No body likes losing data. The good part is that I’ve been lucky enough that, even without backups (now who’s gonna backup a backup disk), I have recovered all my data. All thanks to Christophe GRENIER for Testdisk.

I have been thinking of this topic for some time. I am a happy owner of the old Phat PS3 Model. At one time, I use to do a fair amount of gaming on my computers. So when Sony marketed the PlayStation 3 product, it was cool to see a machine that did:

1. Gaming
2. Movies, Music, Pictures
3. Blu-Ray
4. Ran Linux

I convinced myself to buy a PlayStation 3, that I’d use it for playing with Linux apart from gaming. The regular gaming did not excite any more, perhaps it had to do with the limitation of time. On running Debian on it, was when I realized that the Linux support was merely a joke. The Linux support included running a Linux distribution in a VM with not much access to the full hardware resources. Not a Great Experience