Professionalism
by chapmanccc＠juno.com
To the developers,
The Linux operating system is maturing and we all hope that it will be a major contender in the home and business markets. As it approaches this goal, the customer base changes. Linux is no longer the "geek OS" it once was. Where once the predominant profile of a Linux user was a young male, you now find fathers and husbands (I am both), women (I am married to one) and children (I have three). Linux is my main OS at home and my wife and oldest child also use it.
With this evolution, a level of professionalism must also take place. Being that the Fedora project is one of the leading consumer Linux distributions, I would hope the developers would want to 'lead the pack' in this area.
This brings me to my point. I was rather disappointed with the content in the "WebCollage" and "Barcode" screensavers. These screensavers have since been manually removed from my system, but I would have preferred them not to be installed by default. When I install Mac OS or Windows, garbage like this is not included. Why? Because the developers strive to build a professional product. Yes, I can install items like this with Mac OS or Windows, but I would need to download or purchase them after installing the OS.
Developers, please be considerate when creating the Fedora distributions and let's strive to make Linux as professional as possible.
Thank you,
Chris
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18 years, 11 months
Some analysis of starting a Gnome session under valgrind
by Daniel Veillard
I wanted to do this for a long time but only now I had the time and
a destop beefy enough to try this. Basically I replaced /usr/bin/gnome-session
by a shell script :
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/valgrind --trace-children=yes --log-file=/tmp/valgrind /usr/bin/gnome-session.orig $*
Then logged on in gdm , and checked what happened from an ssh connection
top the box.
The good news:
- logging went through, but it took a few minutes
- everything looked functional though extremely slow
- there wasn't many logs reported by valgrind
The bad news:
- I had to stop the session shortly after the login fully complete
the VM was full (1G of Ram + 500M of swap)
- reports from the logs are a pain to try to analyze.
- one python (rhn applet I suspect) generated a huge log, python-2.3
doesn't seems valgrindable.
I them eliminated all the empty /tmp/valgrind.pid* files, I was left with
reports from oly 25 processes.
First a word of warning, I used the normal optimized code as shipped as
part of Fedora devel (fully up-to-date box for todays version), some
of the optimizations sometimes defeat valgrind so there may be false positive.
I have tried to sort all the reports to gather together what was frequently
reported because all apps went through the same code path, for example
there is an error reported when opening gdk display which is reported like
30 times by various apps. So what I saw most:
- gdk_display_open leading to write(buf) contains uninitialised or
unaddressable byte in __write_nocancel though _X11TransWrite
hard to tell without a debugging lib if the error is a false positive
a lack of initialization gdk_display_open() or within X. Strange thing
is that valgrind report the block as being alloc'ed with calloc()
offending address is 128 bytes inside a block of size 16384
- giop_send_buffer_write in libORBit-2 leading to
Syscall param writev(vector[...]) contains uninitialised or unaddressable byte(s)
that time the uninitialized data is 10 bytes inside a block of size 2048
allocated within orbit itself.
- pango read_line raises a strange pthread mutex error:
pthread_mutex_lock/trylock: mutex has invalid owner
in pthread_mutex_lock called by pango_read_line from pango_find_map
Apparently the GStreamer code detects it's running under valgrind and
manage to shut it up :-)
Except those 3 repeated all other the place and consisting of the bulk of
the reports, I have seen errors in:
- /usr/bin/gnome-session: invalid file descriptors,
pango_attr_list_get_iterator uninitialized value.
- /usr/bin/pam-panel-icon: 2 invalid file descriptor, seems the same
as for gnome-session with value 828 too.
- /usr/lib/libwnck: uninitialized values in _wnck_read_icons
- /usr/libexec/gconfd-2: repeated g_strdup of initialized values
from gconf_set_daemon_ior, gconf_get_lock, gconf_object_to_string,
gconf_quote_string, and an fprintf
- /usr/libexec/bonobo-activation-server: uninitialized values in
CORBA_ORB_object_to_stringr,fprintf,giop_send_buffer_write
- gam_server : I got one too :-)
- metacity: uninitialized values in gdk_window_new, gdk_window_resize,
gdk_region_rectangle, gdk_region_subtract, a couple of strange
g_int_equal bugs, meta_display_begin_grab_op, meta_display_end_grab_op
- gnome-terminal: terminal_profile_update and _vte_pty_open
The best way to double check is to do the same trick as I did for
gnome-session, move the original somewhere else, replace it by a script
calling valgrind but without recursion to child on a local copy of the
program in debugging mode.
Enclosed are the data as sorted and recouped for more informations.
happy valgrinding,
Daniel
--
Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard(a)redhat.com | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
19 years
Thunderbird 0.9 RPM
by Andre Meyer
Hi all
Finally, we have Thunderbird as (default) email client in FC3. But it is version 0.8, while 0.9 has been available for a while. Where can the RPM for version 0.9 be downloaded. None of the familiar places has it. Why is this so? Maybe the solution is just too simple for me to see ;-)
thanks and kind regards
Andre
19 years
Faster login
by David Zeuthen
Hi,
So I had a brief look at shortening startup/login time and tried
disabling rhgb in favor of starting gdm early. It looks pretty
promising; here are some wall-clock numbers from two runs of each
configuration:
| gdm_early | rhgb+gdm |
----------------------+------+-------+-------+------+
GRUB timeout | 0:00 | 0:00 | 0:00 | 0:00 |
Starting udev | 0:13 | 0:13 | 0:13 | 0:14 |
HW init done | 0:25 | 0:25 | 0:26 | 0:26 |
rhgb visible | N/A | N/A | 0:36 | 0:35 |
gdm login visible | 0:43 | 0:44 | 1:25 | 1:26 |
gdm login entered | 0:52 | 0:52 | 1:31 | 1:32 |
GNOME banner visible | 1:13 | 1:14 | 1:40 | 1:41 |
Nautilus Background | 1:33 | 1:32 | 1:51 | 1:52 |
Panel visible | 1:43 | 1:43 | 2:02 | 2:02 |
HD activity off | 1:59 | 1:56 | 2:13 | 2:14 |
The milestones should be pretty self evident. This is on a stock FC3
system running on a IBM T41 1.6GHz (running on AC power), 512MB RAM
without any services manually disabled.
In addition to starting gdm early, the modifications also start up a few
services, D-BUS, HAL and NetworkManager, that is critical to the GNOME
desktop.
Some random thoughts/observations:
- We get the gdm window 40 secs faster
- The 12 secs from "Starting udev" to "HW init done" can be mostly
shaved away/run in parallel
- Kernel bootstrap time (13 secs) can probably be much shorter
(that's what some kernel guys say anyway)
- With this hack we shave twenty secs of the booting time (e.g. from
GRUB until you can use your PC) but booting still feels much quicker
because of the interaction with gdm in the middle (YMMV; e.g. placebo
effect etc.)
- rhgb+gdm spawns an X server each which is sort of stupid and unsafe
(or so some Xorg guys tell me). This solution, per design, avoids
doing that
- we don't get the kudzu screen nor the fsck screens or any other
console interactions. However, IMHO, such screens are not good UI
in the first place - we should instead have GUI replacemnts that
possibly notifies you when you log into the desktop session (stuff
like NetworkManager and HAL alleviates such problems for networking
and storage devices)
- we don't get service startup notification, but, uhmm, is it really
useful learning that the "Console Mouse Service" or "Printing Sub-
system" have started? Instead, this stuff could just be put in gdm
- it could be interesting to make /sbin/init own a D-BUS service that
gdm and other stuff can query and interact with. Could also be fun
to completely replace it with something a'la the SystemServices
prototype that Seth did last year; links
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4711
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/2003/Sep/27
- Could be interesting to instrument the kernel with some pagefault
counters etc. and attempt do more readahead on e.g. the GNOME libs
(both Windows XP and Mac OS X does all that; I think we do too but
I've been told it can be improved)
So, anyway, I think it could be interesting to discuss starting gdm
instead of rhgb. If you want to try out my crude hack, grab the file
here
http://people.redhat.com/davidz/newinit.sh
put it in on your system as /newinit.sh, chmod a+x it and change this
line /etc/inittab
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
to these two lines
#si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
si::sysinit:/newinit.sh
and you should be set to go! If it breaks you get to keep both pieces;
e.g. try this at your own risk [1].
Cheers,
David
[1] :if it doesn't work you can boot your kernel with init=/bin/sh, do a
'mount -n -o remount,rw /' and edit your /etc/inittab file to point to
the original sysinit.
19 years
Long shutdown time behind firewall
by Andre Meyer
Hi all
In FC3 I experience a strange effect that was not there in previous versions: when I shut down at my work location (I have a notebook computer) it takes a few minutes before anything happens. Using the same machine elsewhere does not show this effect. Can this be related to the firewall that is used at work? What might FC3 be waiting for?
thanks and kind regards
Andre
19 years
Suspend to RAM/Disk
by Jamie Larsen
Does anyone know how to do Suspend to RAM/Disk with FC3?
I have an HP xe4560 notebook (Athlon XP-M 2500 with 512 MB DDR).
Suspend to RAM seemed to work with FC3 ("echo 3 > /proc/acpi/sleep").
However, once the machine goes into the suspend mode, I can't get it
back other than a cold reboot.
A couple a days ago, I bought a thin-and-light notebook (Avertec with
Athlon XP-M 2200). Suspend-to-RAM works flawlessly with Windows
XP/Home. Before I overwrite it with FC3, can anyone tell me whether it
may allow the suspend to RAM/Disk operation?
19 years
XMMS defaulting to ARTS
by Sean Bruno
Was wondering if it was intentional that XMMS defaults to using ARTS for
it's output plugin.
19 years
OOO not auto-saving by default
by Sean Bruno
It appears that OOO doesn't have auto-save turned on by default. I just
ran into this with my spouse, who is not very tech savy. She has never
experienced(until now) the loss of a document do to a tech glitch or
other oddities of computers.
I "assumed" that this auto-save feature would be turned on, I would be
incorrect... :)
I enjoy letting my better-half poke around with Linux as it gives me a
better perspective on what works and more importantly what does not.
Anyway, fair warning to all OOO users, turn on your auto-save now,
before it's too late!
Sean Bruno
19 years
How to start only one app in GUI?
by Edilmar Alves - Lista
Hi,
I have a Fedora Core 2 Linux + VNC Server (running into xinetd).
Then, the users may connect remotely to this server and run an app
that I put into desktop (shortcut). But the users have access to other
apps like OpenOffice and Mozilla, and I want:
1) the user may logon and the app starts automatically. Where do I do this?
2) none taskbar, console, etc, the app must start using full-screen,
with no way to change to other apps like Alt+Tab shortcut. Is it possible?
3) the GUI must be light, I'd like to use some GUI with lower resources
than GNOME and KDE. What's the better for this case?
4) the users may be in slow links, I think to use in the future
softwares like FreeNX, and the GUI must be really with low graphical
complexities...
Thanks for any suggestions...
19 years
