10:51 pm, 8 Jun 05
laptop mode and vim
Laptop mode is great: some kernel hacks to keep your disk from spinning up until absolutely necessary.
And it was set up transparently by Ubuntu. By my disk keeps spinning up! Why?
The article has the debugging secret: a flag in proc that'll log which process is causing disk reads/writes. No more watching
The culprit turned out to be a few things, and then it was mostly fixed.
It appears that people are well aware of this problem, but that doesn't do me any good.
And then Debian comes to my rescue!
I can rip the code out, stick the patch in debian/patches,
Watching this recompile it makes me feel a bit like a Gentoo user...
(PS: Dear mac users, this is the sort of thing that keeps me using Linux. If I were using the Other OS, I'd potentially not be able to fix this sort of thing. It makes me feel so powerless.)
And it was set up transparently by Ubuntu. By my disk keeps spinning up! Why?
The article has the debugging secret: a flag in proc that'll log which process is causing disk reads/writes. No more watching
vmstat 1 and guessing.The culprit turned out to be a few things, and then it was mostly fixed.
vim has as -n flag which is "No swap file, use memory only". But strace indicates that it fsync()s on writes anyway. :(It appears that people are well aware of this problem, but that doesn't do me any good.
And then Debian comes to my rescue!
apt-get source vim; apt-get build-dep vim and I have all the source and the exact setup used to build my vim binary.I can rip the code out, stick the patch in debian/patches,
dpkg-buildpackage -i -rfakeroot and it's all fixed.Watching this recompile it makes me feel a bit like a Gentoo user...
(PS: Dear mac users, this is the sort of thing that keeps me using Linux. If I were using the Other OS, I'd potentially not be able to fix this sort of thing. It makes me feel so powerless.)
Is compiling a new Darwin to go under OS X possible? Seems like it should be, but I guess odd things probably happen as there's probably some stuff groping around in Darwin's internal data structures or something.
All that Debian source foo is something I've never taken the time to figure out. I'm generally happy enough just compiling things from tarballs if I can't use the binary package for whatever reason, but I would like to learn just for the sake of keeping all of the packages under dpkgs's watchful eye.
-j
-j
the great thing about open source is that you can pretend you might fix it yourself!
What do you do when you you're trying to accomplish something with an Apple app and they didn't think of it? File a bug report and wait for them to fix it?
But see, that's exactly what I do with open source software, because I don't have the time or desire to come up to speed on how to make meaningful changes to these programs. So I sit there, with an unusable CF reader and a crashing video driver, and wait years for something to change. This notion of "but you can fix it yourself" is just a fantasy.
Here's an example: when you select text and bring up the context menu in Firefox, there's an item to search the web for the text you selected. But it always opens a new tab, instead of a new window, even if (like me) you hate tabs, and have them turned off in preferences.
Unlike most Firefox users, I certainly have the ability to fix that. Having never downloaded the Firefox source, let alone tried to build it, let alone learned anything about its internal structure, that would probably take me a week before I had something that worked. Then I'd have to spend another two weeks arguing with people about how to get it checked in, and whether it was done right (lest I be consigned to re-implementing it every time I had to upgrade because of the security exploit du jour.)
Is it important enough to me to go through all that? Hell no. So instead, I submit a bug report, and wait. (The bug is currently marked "nobody is working on this, fix it yourself".)
How would this be any different with, say, Safari or IE? It's still not gonna get fixed!
And that's an easy one. The bugs that I really care about, like the asstastical video drivers and USB support, I couldn't fix if I wanted to. Not without devoting years to becoming an expert the ins and outs of flaky-assed PC hardware first, which -- let me check -- yes, zero desire to do.
Re: the great thing about open source is that you can pretend you might fix it yourself!
I'm sure that, had I ever done it before, checking out and successfully building Firefox would be all sweetness and light. And if I was already familiar with its internals, hacking it willy-nilly would be trivial.See that flicker, over there on the horizon? That was my point.
Also, I'm glad to hear that on your planet the vast majority of cheap, common hardware just works fine under Linux. When can I book a shuttle flight?
Re: the great thing about open source is that you can pretend you might fix it yourself!
Hey Evan, what was that you were saying about the trolls in my journal?Re: the great thing about open source is that you can pretend you might fix it yourself!
Hey, I just ignore the comments I disagree with. :)Re: the great thing about open source is that you can pretend you might fix it yourself!
Jamie's written his own share of free software, so now he gets to be grumpy about it.Don't suppose your VIM fix has been accepted has it?
I think Ubuntu automatically sets up the ACPI to be using laptop mode. I noticed it because my disk kept spinning up and down...