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”.

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There is a New Year’s SNAFU in which any dates 2010+ are marked “grossly in the future”.  That is a problem since it is now 2010.

Run sa-update and restart SpamAssassin ASAP, or install the following rule to local.cf:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

Thanks to LWN for pointing this out to me before too much damage was done.

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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.

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Microsoft has been denying any problems like this in the media.  Comment if you have had similar experience on Nvidia hardware or Intel graphics.

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The particular problem I am having and see lots of reports on forums is that the backlight is not turning on after an LCD DPMS standby.  What’s particularly bad is that some people are blaming their hardware and buying new inverters for their displays.  My problematic system dual boots Arch Linux and no amount of LCD power on/off sequences will trigger this in Arch.

I suspect though cannot easily prove that the symptoms came after recent “security patches”.  No MS, I don’t have any virus scanners installed so blaming others isn’t going to cut it.  It has gotten particularly bad in my case after the most recent Patch Tuesday.

I can trigger it readily with my LCDoff utility, though it will also happen organically with Windows’ automatic power management.

The question is, to whom or how do I report this?  I don’t want to be told condescending things by a support drone.  With FOSS, I have clear and easy communications with developers.  I’m not aware of an easy way to get that level of interaction from MS.

So, Microsoft, I invite YOU to contact ME if you want to take care of this bug on an easy to reproduce testcase.

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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.

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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.

app-admin/eselect-fontconfig
media-fonts/corefonts
media-fonts/dejavu
media-fonts/font-bh-ttf
media-fonts/font-bh-type1
media-fonts/freefonts
media-fonts/ttf-bitstream-vera
media-fonts/unifont
media-fonts/artwiz-aleczapka-en

Enabling fontconfig options

Use ‘eselect fontconfig list‘ to see a list of available configuration options.

eselect fontconfig list

Try enabling the following with ‘eselect fontconfig enable <num from list above>’:

10-autohint.conf
10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf
25-unhint-nonlatin.conf
57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
57-dejavu-sans.conf
57-dejavu-serif.conf

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.

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font">
 <edit mode="assign" name="rgba">
 <const>rgb</const>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
 <edit mode="assign" name="hinting">
 <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
 <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
 <const>hintfull</const>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
 <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
 <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <!-- Disable autohint for bold fonts so they are not overly bold -->
 <match target="font" >
 <test compare="more" name="weight" >
 <const>medium</const>
 </test>
 <edit mode="assign" name="autohint" >
 <bool>false</bool>
 </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>

Conclusion

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.

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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).

Source code is now available from boo2pdf gitweb.

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Download LCDOff.exe

This should work on fairly old systems, back to Windows NT 3.1 and Windows 95, unlike the C# versions.  It is also 7.5kb vs 85kb.

I wrote it in MASM using the Irvine library for convenience.  Optimized with http://upx.sourceforge.net/

TITLE Monitor Off (main.asm)
; Description: This program turns off your monitor (power saving mode)
; Revision date: 2 November 2009

INCLUDE Irvine32.inc
INCLUDELIB Kernel32.lib
INCLUDELIB User32.lib

SendMessageA PROTO :DWORD,:DWORD,:DWORD,:DWORD
GetConsoleWindow PROTO

WM_SYSCOMMAND = 0112h
SC_MONITORPOWER = 0F170h
OFF = 2

.data
msg BYTE "Monitor off.  Program from Kev009.com",0dh,0ah,0

.code
main PROC

call Clrscr

; Get our window handle to send the event to
INVOKE GetConsoleWindow
; The handle is now in eax
INVOKE SendMessageA, eax, WM_SYSCOMMAND, SC_MONITORPOWER, OFF

mov	 edx,OFFSET msg
call WriteString

exit
main ENDP
END main

I’ve set up a project page at http://www.kev009.com/wp/projects/lcdoff/ if there ever need to be updates.

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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.

yum groupremove Virtualization
yum groupinstall Virtualization

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.

Reboot!

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