I haven’t noticed any killer features in KDE SC 4.4 and I’ve been running it since Beta 1. I’ve noticed a lot of subtle improvements. Things like app stacking and selection in the task bar seem much more responsive. All around, plasma looks subtly better and my favorite KDE apps seem to just keep getting better.
KSysGuard is really impressive and now has the ability to connect to remote hosts for monitoring. However, the biggest change is in the greater ecosystem. It seems all the external apps like Amarok, K3b, and digiKam are coming along to fruition.
Other than that, this is a smooth release and shows that the platform is starting to mature. I think the Summer release distros will be able to do a good job delivering a nice desktop experience based on KDE 4.4. I’ll end with my obligatory “try KDE 4.4 if you had previous bad KDE4 experiences”.
Sun Microsystems has a powerful and favorably priced entry in the x86 workstation space with the Ultra 27. Such is the power of this workstation and its natural fit for *nix workloads, combined with a compelling price tag, I pronounce it the Ultimate Linux Workstation in its class. He’s a short overview and review as well as a video entry at the end.
Ultra 27 Front View
The Ultra 27 is a single socket system but packs a powerful quad core punch. With the Nehalem Xeon (similar to the consumer Core i7), markets that used to demand dual socket systems can now comfortably look to cheaper single socket alternatives. With the return of HyperThreading, the chip handles 8 hardware threads and unlike its previous guise in the Pentium 4, HT contributes noticeably and favorably to performance. Due to the extreme performance and number of execution threads, I think the Nehalem Xeon represents a paradigm shift where most high end systems will no longer carry two discrete CPUs.
The Ultra 27 competes in the same league as the Lenovo ThinkStation S20, HP Z400, Mac Pro Quad and various other boutique workstation manufacturers. Through channel vendors, all but the Mac can be comfortably configured for around $2000.
The price of this system is attractive and affordable to anybody who makes their livelihood off of professional computing. The components on a workstation like this are well engineered and thoroughly tested together. 3rd party vendors will also commonly certify software and hardware against popular workstation offerings. The Ultra 27 is comfortably expandable and can be equipped with Intel’s best CPUs on the market, plenty of disk, and high end graphics. With two PCIe2 16-lane slots and ample cooling and power, the Ultra 27 has a lot to offer anyone in digital content creation, CAD, CAM, CAE or other visualization activities. With the speedy Nehalem chip and 4 disk bays programmers doing large builds or staging large applications should be more than content.
Ultra 27 Rear View
The Ultra 27 comes in a robust light gray case. The Spartan design is free of all the unsightly plastic that usually adorns HP machines and looks more substantial than either the Lenovo or HP competition. The interior isn’t quite as beautiful as the Mac Pro’s, but there is plenty of room and the internal drive bay keeps any need for user cable management to a minimum.
Ultra 27 Inside Overview
My configuration is as follows:
Intel Xeon w3570 Quad Core at 3.20GHz (has intel Turbo Boost to 3.46GHz)
6GB RAM ECC DDR3-1333
nVIDIA Quadro FX 380 graphics
500GB 7200 RPM SATA hard disk
Ultra 27 Drive Bay
I am upgrading from a previous IBM IntelliStation A Pro which had two physical single core AMD Opteron CPUs. The increase in performance is remarkable.
It is noteworthy that this system is much quieter than my previous. Indeed, the large fan is seldom audible even under heavy load. The heat output is negligible and the components have never been more than warm to the touch even after hours of maximal CPU usage.
Ultra 27 Main Board
The case is for the most part toolless and very clean and spacious inside. Every aspect of the system can be easily upgraded so the Ultra 27 should be a good investment and grow with time and requirements.
Ultra 27 Case Diagram
With well engineered hardware and plenty of power, the Ultra 27 is awesome as a general UNIX-class workstation. I am happily running Gentoo and even the largest builds are a cakewalk for this box. I push my computer harder than most people. Commonly running several browser instances loaded with tabs, several terminals, email, music, the Eclipse IDE, and more, interactivity has not diminished even when running parallel compiles.
I’ll conclude that anyone looking at the Mac Pro should consider the alternative in machines like the Sun Ultra 27. This computer represents a latest in a powerful linage of Sun workstations and is ideal for just about any demanding workload you can throw at it.
DRBD has been a long standing external patch in many distribution kernels. It has finally been merged in the 2.6.33 window. Colloquially the “Distributed Redundant Block Device”, this piece of code allows you to mirror blocks of storage across multiple nodes.
This is primarily useful in high availability setups. By synchronously mirroring storage across two systems, you can run an active-passive cluster where the backup machine will take over if the primary fails. Using a more advanced clustering file system such as GFS2 or OCFS, you can even do active-active setups although there are certain considerations there.
This is exciting because it alleviates the need for specialized hardware like SAN storage. Standard Linux servers with direct attached storage may be used and indeed even give appreciable performance. In practice, redundancy will be even greater than all but the highest end SAN equipment due to the lack of single point of failure.
DRBD also allows for asynchronous mirroring, that is, writes to the primary do not wait on completion to the secondary. This is useful for cold site backups and perhaps meeting legal compliance in certain industries as well.
Take a look at the DRBD site for more information and use cases.
Here’s my easy and modern guide to getting pleasant looking fonts on Gentoo with minimal effort.
Wikipedia rendered with the end result of this guide
USE Flags
Enable the following USE flags:
euse --enable truetype type1 cleartype corefonts
and make sure everything is built with them enabled:
emerge -uDNa world
Emerge Fonts
X.org and other apps should pull in some common fonts. Here are some additional fonts useful for OpenOffice and other programs. Dejavu provides excellent default fonts which we will enable in the next section.
This will give you very nice hinted fonts suitable for the great majority of RGB LCD displays.
The 57- series rules enable dejavu fonts as the default Serif and Sans Serif fonts. This will improve the look of your desktop environment and programs like Firefox immediately.
~/.fonts.conf
This file controls your user fontconfig settings. We will reiterate RGB hinting and disable it for bold fonts so they are not overly bold. There are plenty of other tricks you can perform in this file to get more Windows-like text, but I’m quite satisfied with the following and find it very easy to read.
Please share any thoughts and tips in the comments. I recommend browsing the X.org Font Guide on Gentoo Wiki, though some of the information there is out of date or more complex than the method I just outlined.
I did some minor updates to boo2pdf. Graphics should now be within the page margins. Please let me know if there are any other common formatting mistakes.
Unfortunately, IBM’s “transmogrifier” utility doesn’t work very well in Wine, so you should preprocess older books in Windows before running them through the boo2pdf web service (download is on that page).
I’m happy to report that the updated Gitco Xen 3.4.1 repo is working well on CentOS 5.4.
If you are doing link bonding and bridging in accordance with my previous post “Xen 3.3 in RHEL/CentOS 5 and more Link Aggregation Fun“, you no longer need to patch the network scripts as RedHat fixed the initscripts package in RHEL 5.4.
Upgrade procedure for CentOS 5.3 to 5.4:
yum clean all
yum update glibc\*
yum update yum\* rpm\* python\*
yum clean all
yum upgrade
reboot
Updated Xen Install Guide From My Previous Article:
Head over to http://www.gitco.de/repo/ and grab the repo for your arch. (Most likely wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/CentOS5-GITCO_x86_64.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/ for the uninitiated).
If you already have Xen installed, you may need to remove and readd it.
You’ll also get some updated tools like Virtual Machine Monitor 0.7.0 that make it easier to install newer guests such as Fedora 11 or Ubuntu. Sweet!
Double check /etc/sysconfig/kernel. It should be set to kernel-xen. Likewise, check /boot/grub.conf and make sure that the Xen kernel is the default if the aforementioned was not done beforehand.
I’ve just uploaded a beta of boo2pdf, an IBM BookManager to PDF conversion app & web service. I’m currently experimenting with the HTML to PDF backends and would like feedback with book files I haven’t tried. Once the code is cleaned up, I will dump it on my site.
Motivation
I have a large collection of old IBM machines and documentation. I want this documentation indexed by my own search facilities and Google for easy retrieval. PDF is widely read, while BookManager requires proprietary software and no search engines I know of parse it. This will probably be useful to Mainframers as well.
I had an interesting day today. At school, we had a social event with an industry governing board and several local software companies in the Charleston, South Carolina region. Aside from meeting a lot of new people, I was able to ask some of the industry leaders present about the platform and languages they used.
Perhaps the most interesting was that many Microsoft shops are moving away from fat client apps to web apps, and not simply because it is a buzzworthy thing to do. The primary driver is the proliferation of advanced mobile devices, namely iPhone, Palm Pre, and Blackberry. Two of the companies I talked to were VB.NET or C# shops and used to do traditional fat client software. Due partially to the smartphone craze, they are moving SaaS. They also mentioned the Mac as a rising popularity, but no Linux or netbooks or anything like that. It’s funny how venerable HTML has become.. now the medium of choice for displaying cross-platform applicaitons. I doubt anybody every imagined just how important HTML and JavaScript would become during their infancy.
Surprising and delightful to me was the talk of Open Source in the enterprise. I spoke with two gentlemen from different large defense contractors and they were spot on with there assertions that Open Source software is superior in many ways. Both were large Java EE shops and mentioned how they could check and verify FOSS for security much better than any proprietary software would allow. They mentioned that the US Government is one of the largest purchasers of software but even then working with COTS vendors is difficult and FOSS solves many of these problems by allowing them to commit back changes. The thing that made me the most happy was when one rep said that active participation in an Open Source project was a surefire way to boost a resume to the top of a stack.
Another interesting tidbit was that virtualization is synonymous with VMWare here (everyone specified this by name) even today. I’d go as far as to say that I’d probably have received strange looks if I had mentioned KVM or even a heavyweight like Xen or MS Virtual Server. Aside from Windows, the defense guys talked a lot about Solaris. I didn’t get much reaction when mentioning Linux to anybody, sadly. (somewhat comically) the non-profits were largely the 100% Microsoft shops.
I had the displeasure of working at an erecycler several years ago. Even watching stuff come off the trucks, it was very hard to get anything before it was utterly destroyed by the yard goons. Inserting a forklift blade into a 19″ rack cabinet was common practice and I witnessed on numerous occasions the dropping of them in this fashion. Once, they even rolled a forklift off the ramp. These events were always followed by a flurry of Spanish profanity and I usually had to check my pants for continence afterward from laughing so hard. It is a miracle nobody has ever been seriously maimed there to the best of my knowledge.
The highlight of this job experience was when the greedy goons resold a defective Siemens blood handling instrument of some sort that was sent specifically to them to be destroyed (as was EVERYTHING, in theory). The serial number was traced back to them and there was an all out shitstorm. A team of inspectors was flown out from Germany. The goons put on a particularly hilarious show buying hardhats, safety vests, warning signs, identification badges, and more. Somehow, they kept the contract (it was probably just “check you ass” on Siemen’s part — dumping obsolete X-Ray, MRI machines, medical waste, etc for free must be hard to pass up) and all of this change disappeared within a couple days.
What is remarkable is that the above business got multi-millions of dollars of inventory for FREE every year. I really can’t think of any other business model like it. The owner is completely incompetent and morally bankrupt. Very little was put back into the company’s facilities, employees (except maybe a couple at the top), or development. None of the employees had an IQ above room temperature, and everybody seemed content to keep it that way.
There is a happy ending though. A skid of IBM RS/6000 7012 systems from Intel came in at one time. Among the 20-30 machines was a lone -397 that I snagged. This is my favorite collectors box to date (it is the same POWER2 CPU type used in the famous Deep Blue super computer).
