Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Issues with the spare computer
I don't quite remember if I mentioned it, but my step mother recently wanted me to set her up with a spare computer for the dining room. It seems in this day and age when we as humans have come to rely on technology and computers so much an additional computer is required in a home (right now there are 4 here at my father's). The spare computer is fairly old, clocking in at 700MHz and 256MB ram. For this reason, I decided the best route to take would be to install an Arch + Openbox system rather than a full featured DE.
Everything seemed to run OK., aside from flash chunking like mad when watching movies on sites like youtube. The other thing that didn't seem to work would be the DVD drive, which only seemed to be picked up as a CDRW. Not too sure what the cause of that is just yet. Edit: Problem is non-existent. DVDs pickup now. I'm fairly sure it was a problem with the DVD I was trying before.
Anywho, the computer seemed to run just dandy for a day or two. Soon, though, it began to lock up when viewing youtube videos every once in a while. I was a tad lost, and my step mother wasn't too happy, to say the least. I didn't blame her; if I were watching a video and suddenly my entire computer would lock up, I would not be a happy camper.
I ssh'd into the computer and monitored the ram usage while she surfed the net. I noticed that even with Firefox3b5, the ram footprint while surfing her normal workload of websites would eat up around 20-40% of the ram. Note that this is not a big surprise, as my stepmother had open three instances of Firefox each with multiple tabs. This wasn't necessarily the problem.
I kept the ssh session open and noticed Firefox was slowly eating up more and more ram. A quick Google search told me that even with firefox3, there are still unresolved memory leaks that may NEVER be resolved. It all began to make sense. My step mother confirmed that she was in fact leaving her browsers open overnight and then coming back to them the next day, only to find that when she tried to do anything that'd hog up the memory, her computer would lock up. I simply told her that the best course of action would be to close out of her browsers when she was done, or to simply logout of the system and just log back in in the morning.
I'm curious, though... how is Firefox so well loved even with (a) memory leak(s)? It seems that Mozilla is on the warpath as far as memory usage goes, but one must still wonder how they got so high on the pedestal in the first place.
As a side, the website I listed earlier, Jesse Ruderman's blog, seems to focus on the development of Firefox quite closely.
Everything seemed to run OK., aside from flash chunking like mad when watching movies on sites like youtube. The other thing that didn't seem to work would be the DVD drive, which only seemed to be picked up as a CDRW. Not too sure what the cause of that is just yet. Edit: Problem is non-existent. DVDs pickup now. I'm fairly sure it was a problem with the DVD I was trying before.
Anywho, the computer seemed to run just dandy for a day or two. Soon, though, it began to lock up when viewing youtube videos every once in a while. I was a tad lost, and my step mother wasn't too happy, to say the least. I didn't blame her; if I were watching a video and suddenly my entire computer would lock up, I would not be a happy camper.
I ssh'd into the computer and monitored the ram usage while she surfed the net. I noticed that even with Firefox3b5, the ram footprint while surfing her normal workload of websites would eat up around 20-40% of the ram. Note that this is not a big surprise, as my stepmother had open three instances of Firefox each with multiple tabs. This wasn't necessarily the problem.
I kept the ssh session open and noticed Firefox was slowly eating up more and more ram. A quick Google search told me that even with firefox3, there are still unresolved memory leaks that may NEVER be resolved. It all began to make sense. My step mother confirmed that she was in fact leaving her browsers open overnight and then coming back to them the next day, only to find that when she tried to do anything that'd hog up the memory, her computer would lock up. I simply told her that the best course of action would be to close out of her browsers when she was done, or to simply logout of the system and just log back in in the morning.
I'm curious, though... how is Firefox so well loved even with (a) memory leak(s)? It seems that Mozilla is on the warpath as far as memory usage goes, but one must still wonder how they got so high on the pedestal in the first place.
As a side, the website I listed earlier, Jesse Ruderman's blog, seems to focus on the development of Firefox quite closely.
Labels: arch linux, firefox, legacy, trouble shooting
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Persistence
After a full day of wrestling, I finally got an old family computer (A PIII 700mhz with 256 ram and a 20GB harddrive) to the point where I'd call it "finished". I installed Arch (of course) along with Openbox and Thunar. The family will have to learn to survive without Desktop icons.
Since this machine was going to be going in the living room, having it connect to the router via a wire was out of the question. Instead we purchased a Linksys wmp54g wireless PCI card. At first I thought I was going to have a rough time, as the card wouldn't scan with "iwlist scanning". After about an hour or two of trying different stuff (but not ndiswrapper), I finally decided to just install wicd and see if it worked. For some reason, it decided to work. I'm not complaining.
The second thing that messed me up was the xserver. The machine itself is a very old machine, so it can't handle AIGLX. Every time I would try to startx, the mouse would appear, but after 5 or so seconds, the whole screen would freeze and I'd be greeted with a barrage of fantastic colors and lights. While some might consider this trippy, I wasn't pleased; There was no way for me to use my keyboard to escape or kill the process. I eventually had to shutdown and start from runtime 3.
How did I finally figure out that I needed to disable AIGLX? I Google'd my vga controller according to lspci along with the error that /var/log/errors.log spit out. After some reading, I had to do this:
Just goes to show that it may not be a good idea to trash computers at the first sign of sluggishness. Get the right kind of computer geek that's willing to blow away an entire day and you may have yourself a happy new addition to the family.
Since this machine was going to be going in the living room, having it connect to the router via a wire was out of the question. Instead we purchased a Linksys wmp54g wireless PCI card. At first I thought I was going to have a rough time, as the card wouldn't scan with "iwlist scanning". After about an hour or two of trying different stuff (but not ndiswrapper), I finally decided to just install wicd and see if it worked. For some reason, it decided to work. I'm not complaining.
The second thing that messed me up was the xserver. The machine itself is a very old machine, so it can't handle AIGLX. Every time I would try to startx, the mouse would appear, but after 5 or so seconds, the whole screen would freeze and I'd be greeted with a barrage of fantastic colors and lights. While some might consider this trippy, I wasn't pleased; There was no way for me to use my keyboard to escape or kill the process. I eventually had to shutdown and start from runtime 3.
How did I finally figure out that I needed to disable AIGLX? I Google'd my vga controller according to lspci along with the error that /var/log/errors.log spit out. After some reading, I had to do this:
After much wrestling, the family computer is humming along quite nicely. I've even set up an ssh server on it so I should be able to access it from far away if they need help with it.Section "ServerLayout"
....
Option "AIGLX" "false"
EndSection
Just goes to show that it may not be a good idea to trash computers at the first sign of sluggishness. Get the right kind of computer geek that's willing to blow away an entire day and you may have yourself a happy new addition to the family.
Labels: arch linux, legacy, victory
Screenshots
Desktop:
Laptop: