Posts tagged desktop
Nvidia Driver on Linux – Easy, and Quick
Feb 7th
- Image via CrunchBase
There is a buzz that installing the Linux based Nvidia accelerated graphics driver is complicated. I consider it rather straight forward. First install build-essential, and the headers for your kernel. Those may appear to be some bigs words in the previous sentence, but it is really one line in a terminal window. Build essential installs GCC and its dependencies:
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Now download the latest and greatest Nvidia driver. Choose the correct build type for your architecture. Conveniently save the file to your desktop and rename it to nvidia.run. The change your tty to another. To change to tty2 press control-alt f2.
Shut down gdm, which will stop X11:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
Or if you are using the new process manager in Ubuntu 9.10 you can use also:
sudo service gdm stop
Then execute the Nvidia installation script. Login to the command prompt and navigate to the desktop:
cd Desktop
sudo sh nvidia.run
Basically answer yes to everything, let the driver compile, and then when it asks you to configure the xorg.conf file, let it. Nowadays the Nvidia driver basically works out of the box. In the past, with Ubuntu in particular, you had to comment out the included driver in Ubuntu’s modules package, otherwise the custom compiled driver would not load on startup. The open source driver used to be commented out in /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common (comment NV); note that this is not needed any more except in Hardy (8.04).
Then start your gdm session, which will take you back to the login window, or your desktop depending on your startup settings:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start
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Your Server – The Boot Process
Dec 9th
You want to isolate all your server features into background process. You don’t want any server features to be dependent on graphical or client side applications. I previously had my mail server dependent on the client side filtering capabilities of Thunderbird. This was a no no because it required me to maintain a desktop session. This was not optimal because during the day the desktop session was swapped to the hard drive and this caused substantial system lag when coming back to use the desktop. Now with VBoxTool, the web server is automatically booted with the host system, and all functions on the server are consolidated to background processes; there is no more dependency on client side filtering. The MythTV server also boots with the host, and the first screen the host encounters is the GDM login. Now the system is secure. Passwords are required to enter the system as a user.
Fsck – Debian – Ubuntu File System Check
Dec 6th
You cannot run fsck from within a desktop session. A desktop session requires run-level 2, and there are way to many applications running to not damage your hard drive irreparably. Therefore open a terminal windows and type:
sudo init 1
Then unmount everything:
sudo umount -a
Then you can run fsck. Run fsck with the -c option, and it will scan for bad block on the drive. When I had the first Asus Eeepc the SSD got corrupted really fast. It would be sloooooooow. I ran fsck -c and it scanned for bad block and added them to the bad block list. The drive became responsive again, like new. The -c option will scan for bad block before scanning the file system.
Then, afterwards, you can run:
sudo init 2
Swap Lag – Time to Retreive Data
Oct 25th
I have a virtual machine, a MythTV server, and an email server running on my computer at home. The compiz desktop environment will lag substantially when I get home from work. I conclude that this is because during the day the desktop interface is not being use therefore it is thrown to the swap. There are several things that can be done to alleviate this lag.
1) The easiest thing to do is turn the swap off completely. This is done with a simple command:
sudo swapoff -a
2) I can logout of the desktop session to the GDM window.
Then after logging in the desktop session will be new in memory and will be responsive accordingly. The problem with this is that I need Thunderbird for its mail filtering capabilities. I can do mail filtering server level with Sieve, but I cannot get it to work right. I don’t know why it wont work, but to get around the problem, and achieve the same functionality, I use Thunderbird which is a graphical application. TO use Thunderbird I need the Gnome desktop fully loaded. EOS (End of Story).
3) To help with the situation you can renice running processes to help you desktop environment get better priority with the processor. Overall I wish I could get Sieve working, then I could just logout of the desktop session when I am done using it. The server would just run in the background using a “nohup” command, but im stuck with needing Thunderbird’s mail filtering. So for now I’ve turned the swap off to maintain system responsiveness. This is working ok because of the 8 gigs the system has. I will try to get Sieve working again.
Personal Cloud Computing From Your Own Server – EyeOS
Oct 25th
EyeOS
EyeOS is a fully functional personal cloud desktop. Install it on your server, with or without mysql database support. The software supports flat file storage, so basically drag and drop the package, set a couple of file and folder permissions, walk through the administrator panel and your good to go with your own personal cloud computer. Best of all you are not paying any subscription fees. If you host your own server, there you go, and if you rent space, there you go too. In your browser remove the status bar from the bottom; which is most likely in the view tab. Then hit maximize and viola a fullscreen desktop anywhere you have a web browser. Frankly it works just fine for most things. Clearly its not going to run Windows applications, or Linux apps for that matter, but you can do the basics. Word processing, spreadheets and all that office goodness. FTP, and a web browser so you don’t have to leave your cloud desktop to search the net. I think the idea of a cload computer is excellent. Functionality is the most important thing, and it still feels like a desktop in your web browser is missing a couple of things. In time maybe the browser based desktop experience may feel more seamless, which hopefully is the primary goal of such projects.
Wmctrl Recap – Placing Windows Automatically on Boot – Compiz Viewports
Jul 13th
Wmctrl allows you to move windows around the screen, resize windows and other options. For a full list of options use: wmctrl --help For compiz, the desktop is extended in either/and the x y directions. For example if you have 4 sides to the cube your x direction is extended 4 times. If you desktop is 1920 wide, then the second viewport, or the second side of the cube starts at x position 1921. To move a windows to the second cube face you want to relocate it to x position 1921. The -e option of wmctrl does exactly this. Use -r to select the window that you want to automatically relocate. An example of the code to use in a startup script is as follows. This code snippet replaces mythtv to the second face of my desktop cube. wmctrl -r "mythfrontend.real" -e 0,1921,0,1920,1080
You can see mythtv on the second face of the cube.
