Multi-tasking in openSUSE

This post is testimony to my satisfaction with openSUSE 11.1. On my Compaq Presario v6409, I am freely multi-tasking wihtout bothering for system crash or hangs.

On the same system, with a Windows OS, I would not try music, Firefox with multiple tabs, Thunderbird, two open pdf files simultaneously ever; but with openSUSE I can do even more and it runs smooth. Actually, here I have got a couple of KWrite sessions, an emacs session and a chat sessions on as well. Moreover, if it were Vista, it would be crawling halfway through the trial. By the way, I also edited the blog images in Gimp with all these open.

Qtcurve updated

I updated qtcurve-gtk2 to version 0.62.5-8.1 on my opensuse 11.1 and the results were apparent in my Thunderbird buttons.

Fine tuning boot on openSUSE 11.1

Recently, I have been trying to fine tune my bootup process. I installed sreadahead from openSUSE build service. I also installed mkinitrd, aaa_base, bootchart, udev, and sysvinit from the devel:playground:fastboot repository. Here is the result.

The disk usage is more frequent but bootup time increased. Also I found that while shutdown the drives could not be umounted properly and my system time was configured to UTC instead of IST.

Next I installed module-init-tools, libvolumeid1, sysconfig, glib2, glib2-devel from that repo and tested. Here are the results.

The disk utilization has improved. Another observation was uniformity in CPU utilization. Earlier it used to be heavy at some periods, and nearly no CPU utilization rest of the time.

Next I have tried installing gconf2, gconf2-devel, gvfs, gvfs-backends, gvfs-fuse, kbd, libbonobo, libbonobo-devel, libgio, libgio-fam, libglib, libgmodule, libgobject, libgthread, libgvfscommon and xorg-x11-driver-video.

Bootchart on opensuse 11.1

After my trials on my Gentoo system, I wanted to chart out the bootup of my opensuse system.

Opensuse has parallel boot by default. It is interesting to see that out of the box, without any tweaking it is one of the fastest booting systems.

Improving on bootchart

From the the bootcharts I posted in my previous post, it is obvious that sleep times could be eliminated to bet better boot up performance. So I thought of looking at boot messages to find processes that I could do away with or at least do something about. During boot-up, the boot process was looking for ethernet connection, i.e. it was trying to bring up net.eth0. As internet wasn't always connected, it was waiting longer when started with no connection. So I created an offline runlevel and added a new entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst. The procedure is described well in the Gentoo handbook. Here is what I got: a reduction of about 30 seconds in boot-up time.

Bootchart on Gentoo

Recently I tried to chart out my system's boot-up. I got bootchart on my new Gentoo. Then I added a line to my menu.lst as described at the bootchart site and rebooted to test my boot-up. Here is what I got.

I read little more about it and found that I can turn on RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP in /etc/conf.d/rc to get slight improvement in speed. I read that in the comments of the rc file. It was also suggested that I should turn on RC_VERBOSE. So I did it. I got a five seconds increase.

Here is the output of uname -a (I have cut out unnecessary parts like system time)
Linux 2.6.27-gentoo-r8 #1 SMP i686
Intel(R) Core(TM) Duo CPU T2300 @ 1.66GHz

Here is the bootchart with a scheduled filesystem check.

Nice tool

Keyboard not working

Yesterday, after starting my openSUSE 11.1, I logged into my normal user account in KDE 4.1 session. I was surprised to find that my laptop keyboard was not working. I could use the touchpad but I could not get the keyboard to work. On top of it, I was also having an online exam to take.

I logged out and retried but it did not work. Then I restarted and retried yet again in vain. I thought I should check on my keyboard as well. So I logged into an Enlightenment session and I found that my keyboard was OK. I went on with my exam.

After finishing it, I logged out logged back as root into a KDE 4.1 session and found the keyboard to be working. I figures this was because settings for that user had changed for some reason. I was quite surprised because I had not done any installs. I hadn't even deleted a file.

I connected my USB keyboard (which I had got to play games though I haven't played in about a year now) to see if it works. It didn't either. I logged back into Enlightenment, and launched Konversation and joined #opensuse-kde and #suse on Freenode. I stated my problem. After discussing for some time, though I didn't find any solution, I realized that it was a very rare situation. Then I made a post at opensuse forums and went to sleep.

Today morning, I found replies on it. One was about kwin. I knew about it from last night's discussion at IRC. Issuing the command


kwin --replace

should do it for me; at least that's what I know now. However, for that to work I need to get my keyboard working. The other reply asked me to login on command line, run sax2, select my keyboard and then run kdm and start a KDE session.

I tried this one. It worked for me. I thought I should blog about it and started writing this blog. While I was halfway through all of a sudden, i was typing but no letters appeared. Thats when I realized that the keyboard wasn't working with KDE yet again. So I saved the blog and logged out of KDE. I have completed the blog in Enlightenment but my problem stays.

Samsung's OLED

Promising indeed.