Linux

Most UNIX users have heard of the nice utility used to run a command with a lower priority to make sure that it only runs when nothing more important is trying to get a hold of the CPU: nice long_running_script.sh That's only dealing with part of the problem though because the CPU is not all there is. A low priority command could still be interfering with other tasks by stealing valuable I/O cycles (e.g. accessing the hard drive). Prioritizing I/O Another Linux command, ionice, allows users to set the I/O priority to be lower than all other processes. Here's how to make sure that a script doesn't get to do any I/O unless the resource it wants to use is idle: sudo ionice -c3 hammer_disk.sh The above only works as root, but the following is a pretty good approximation that works for non-root users as well: ionice -n7 hammer_disk.sh You may think that running a command with both nice and ionice would have absolutely no impact on other tasks running on the same machine, but there is one more aspect to consider, at least on machines with limited memory: the disk cache. Polluting the disk cache If you run a command (for example a program that goes through the entire file system checking various things, you will find that the kernel will start pulling more files into its cache and expunge cache entries used by other processes. This can have a very significant impact on a system as useful portions of memory are swapped out. For example, on my laptop, the nightly debsums, rkhunter and tiger cron jobs essentially clear my disk cache of useful entries and force the system to slowly page everything back into memory as I unlock my screen saver in the morning. Thankfully, there is now a solution for this in Debian: the nocache package. This is what my long-running cron jobs now look like: nocache ionice -c3 nice long_running.sh Turning off disk syncs Another relatively unknown tool, which I would certainly not recommend for all cron jobs but is nevertheless related to I/O, is eatmydata. If you wrap it around a command, it will run without bothering to periodically make sure that it flushes any changes to disk. This can speed things up significantly but it should obviously not be used for anything that has important side effects or that cannot be re-run in case of failure. After all, its name is very appropriate. It will eat your data!

Thanks to DoctorMo for the hilarious photo. It’s just so good. We’ve got Classes working, the usual fixes from the ‘crew, and native macros. Huzzah!  I’ve had to take the site down for now (well, stop updating it) because of a vulnerability I introduced (macros allow arbitrary code to run), which means, if anyone’s keen, they should add the sandboxing code to the Hy Site as well! More coming soon!

(Posted 17 May 2013 by gg234)

As many of you will know, our goal is to get the Ubuntu phone in a state where it can be used on a daily basis for testing, and importantly, finding bugs, UI issues, and other details that help us to refine the overall Ubuntu Touch experience. Progress is on-track for the end of May. I decided to start dogfooding a little early (please remember, we are shooting for the beginning of July to be broadly in shape for dogfooding, so if you try, don’t expect things to be ready right now), so today I put my SIM card in my Galaxy Nexus with Ubuntu Touch and things are working pretty well so far. It seems that my data is no longer getting wiped on image updates, which helps testing significantly, so I am regularly upgrading with the daily images. As ever, if you decide to test, you are doing so at your own risk…don’t be surprised to see bugs, crashes, and potential data loss (although I have not seen any data loss so far). Some notes about my experience dogfooding: Making and recieving phone calls works well. I am using T-Mobile as my network. Sending and recieving texts works well too. Messages appear chronologically. Contact syncing is not in place but Sergio blogged about how to sync your contacts from Google. This has made my phone infinately more useful and rather nicely, it pulls in the avatars too so I can see who is calling me. Browsing and connecting to wireless networks works well. The browser works well overall, although currently requires wifi (3G browsing coming soon). Camera works well (for still photos, video not implemented yet) and I can browse my pictures in the gallery. Many of the community-written core apps are present and working. Calendar lets me save and browse calendar events (although syncing with a calendar service is not there yet). Weather showes me the weather for my area right now and a week long forcast. Calculator is working and largely feature-complete. Other core apps are on their way to the daily image soon. Overall the core Unity UI is working well. I can search for apps, load them, quit them, multi-tasting works well, and the indicators work (for adjusting volume etc). The primary blockers in my way right now for normal use out and about are: The screen does not auto shut-off. This means if the screen gets turned on in my pocket it never turns off and the battery dies. Speakerphone not wired into the UI yet. Can’t set the time on the phone yet. Also, the alarm feature in the clock doesn’t work; I need this to get me up in the morning. Not so much a blocker, but the phone is still filled with example material and contacts. They need to be removed. All of these are on the TODO list for complettion by the end of the month. I have been filing bugs for a bunch of the issues I am seeing on a day to day basis and the team are working hard to hit the end of May goal. Overall progress is looking good. Although I have been using the daily images for quite some time on a phone without a SIM card, using as an actual phone is even more motivating than before. I can feel the phone coming together and when we get many of these issues fixed, it is going to deliver a far superior experience than the Android phone I was using before.

New submitter Anand Radhakrishnan writes "The release candidate for the much-anticipated Linux Mint 15 'Olivia' is available for user testing. Its many new features include Cinnamon Control center, an improved login manager with HTML 5 support, a driver manager, and a lot of under-the-hood improvements. 'A new tool called MintSources, aka "Software Sources," was developed from scratch with derivative distributions in mind (primarily Linux Mint, but also LMDE, Netrunner and Snow Linux). It replaces software-properties-gtk and is perfectly adapted to managing software sources in Linux Mint. From the main screen you can easily enable or disable optional components and gain access to backports, unstable packages and source code.' This release with Cinnamon looks really tempting." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If I did everything right, this post will not appear on any RSS feed yet still make it to my blog to maintain history. The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs: In Total: 1088 Affecting Jessie: 214 That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories: Affecting Jessie and unstable: 183 Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable: 43 bugs are tagged 'patch'. Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them. 15 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate! 125 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. Help make a first step towards resolution! Affecting Jessie only: 31 Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to Jessie. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests. 0 bugs are in packages that are unblocked by the release team. 31 bugs are in packages that are not unblocked. How do we compare to the Squeeze release cycle? Week Squeeze Wheezy Diff 43 284 (213+71) 468 (332+136) +184 (+119/+65) 44 261 (201+60) 408 (265+143) +147 (+64/+83) 45 261 (205+56) 425 (291+134) +164 (+86/+78) 46 271 (200+71) 401 (258+143) +130 (+58/+72) 47 283 (209+74) 366 (221+145) +83 (+12/+71) 48 256 (177+79) 378 (230+148) +122 (+53/+69) 49 256 (180+76) 360 (216+155) +104 (+36/+79) 50 204 (148+56) 339 (195+144) +135 (+47/+90) 51 178 (124+54) 323 (190+133) +145 (+66/+79) 52 115 (78+37) 289 (190+99) +174 (+112/+62) 1 93 (60+33) 287 (171+116) +194 (+111/+83) 2 82 (46+36) 271 (162+109) +189 (+116/+73) 3 25 (15+10) 249 (165+84) +224 (+150/+74) 4 14 (8+6) 244 (176+68) +230 (+168/+62) 5 2 (0+2) 224 (132+92) +222 (+132/+90) 6 release! 212 (129+83) +212 (+129/+83) 7 release+1 194 (128+66) +194 (+128/+66) 8 release+2 206 (144+62) +206 (+144/+62) 9 release+3 174 (105+69) +174 (+105/+69) 10 release+4 120 (72+48) +120 (+72/+48) 11 release+5 115 (74+41) +115 (+74/+41) 12 release+6 93 (47+46) +93 (+47/+46) 13 release+7 50 (24+26) +50 (+24/+26) 14 release+8 51 (32+19) +51 (+32/+19) 15 release+9 39 (32+7) +39 (+32/+7) 16 release+10 20 (12+8) +20 (+12/+8) 17 release+11 24 (19+5) +24 (+19/+5) 18 release+12 2 (2+0) +2 (+2/+0) Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

Howdy, i’m sure most people are aware of the recent release of Moblin 2.0; a user experience for netbooks. I’m going to write a few blog posts about how the Moblin user experience is built on the awesome technologies in the GNOME platform. So first up, let’s look at the Myzone, we’re starting here since this is the first thing I really worked on in the Moblin UX and i’ve been able to see it through from early ideas to the 2.0 and 2.1 releases. So, deep breath, the idea behind the Myzone is to provide a springboard to things that matter to you most: your recent files and web pages you’ve visited, your upcoming events and things you need to do, things that are happening on social web services and your favourite applications. Now then, that’s the theory, how does it work: Recent files: Recent file information is pulled from the GtkRecentManager and the thumbnails are pulled from the XDG thumbnail specification directory. Metadata for the file comes courtesy of gio which I presume comes from shared-mime-info. Yay. By using the GtkRecentManager for all our recent activity metadata across the platform we’re allowing legacy GNOME applications to just work. Sweet. Events and tasks: These are pulled from EDS using libjana, a calendaring library primarily developed by Chris Lord (of Dates fame.) A couple of months back (well, uh, March) I enhanced libjana to support tasks and thus we are able reuse the existing Tasks/Dates apps for interacting with the calendar. Favourite apps: Here I let the side down. I use some quite crazy custom format for doing this which frankly stinks. I’m going to try and sit down with the GNOME shell guys to see if we can come up with some better way for dealing with user originated application metadata. Social networking/web service integration: This comes courtesy of Mojito and librest, two projects that I and the esteemed Ross Burton have been working on. Mojito is a project that pulls in content from a variety web services into a centralised place, abstracting some of the complexity and the makes it trivial to query. librest is a library for to keep developers happy even though they’re having to deal with web services. It does this by making requests and parsing the result simple.

Previously i’d talked about how we use GNOME technologies in the Moblin Myzone. Now i’m going to talk about another component that i’m responsible for, the People Panel. An important aspect of the Moblin user experience is about communicating with others and this panel provides quick access to do this. The core of the content is provided by an abstraction, simplification and aggregation library called Anerley. This provides a “feed” of “items” (an addressbook of people) that aggregates across the system addressbook, powered by EDS, and your IM roster, powered by Telepathy. You have small set of actions you can do on these people such as start an IM conversation / email / edit them with Contacts. The core of our IM experience is supplied by the awesome Empathy. We’ve been working with the upstream maintainers to accomodate some of the needs of Moblin into the upstream source. This included the improvements to the accounts dialog and wizard that landed for GNOME 2.28. One of the biggest problems with the IM experience in Moblin 2.0 was that it was easy to miss when somebody was talking to you. If you were looking away when the notification popped up, whoops, it’s gone. With our switch to Mission Control 5 I was able to integrate a Telepathy Observer into Anerley and the People Panel. An Observer will be informed of channels that are requested on the system. This allows us to show ongoing conversations in the panel and by exploiting channel requests and window presentation allow the user to switch between ongoing conversations. This wouldn’t have been possible without the assistance of the nice folks in #telepathy and at Collabora: Sjoerd, Will, Jonny and countless others.

I've added epub support to Debian developers reference 3.4.10 (see /usr/share/doc/developers-reference*/*.epub), so you can read it with your favorite ebook reader like kindle, sony reader or something that NetBSD folks uses for porting ;-)

You've got to admire the cheek: when the UK government asked Google why its UK operation barely paid tax, Google's answer was that it only employed leprechauns and that as we all know, fictional creatures are tax-exempt. Okay, not quite, but the real answer was hardly more believable: all those UK people selling from Google's UK offices to UK businesses aren't actually selling anything at all, because everything happens in Ireland. Amazon provides a similarly tall story: despite delivering goods from UK warehouses to UK addresses, everything it does takes place in Luxembourg. Even the Luxembourg bit doesn't pay much tax: according to the Independent, it in turn pays fees to another, tax-exempt Amazon entity.Can anything be done?When Amazon is receiving more money in UK grants than it pays in UK corporation tax, something is terribly wrong.Google's Matt Brittin says that "tax is not a matter of choice. Tax is a matter of following the law." He's right, but MPs claim that the law isn't being followed here, that Google and Amazon clearly don't do all the legwork in Dublin and Luxembourg, and that as a result the UK taxpayer is being cheated. It certainly looks that way. Does anybody other than HMRC believe that Google doesn't do anything important in the UK, or that Amazon's 4,000-plus UK staff sit around all day doing nothing but humming? This matters because Britain is apparently broke, and the firms that avoid tax are often driving other, tax-paying, companies out of business. If what they're doing is illegal then they need the book thrown at them, and if it isn't then the law needs updated. I'm not naive enough to think that cracking down on the tech firms will solve all of the world's problems - Amazon's "sod-profit let's-grow" strategy means it makes relatively small taxable profits anyway, and will continue to do so until it's the only retailer left on Earth.But when HMRC names and shames kebab shop owners for unpaid tax you'd think it might want to do something about the billions of pounds that bigger firms aren't paying.