Linux saved my desktop (part deux)

After I had moved my desktop a bit away from my desk, and started it up again (a few days later) I first went into BIOS to see if there were any ‘weird’ settings there. Everything looked fine. You can read out CPU temperature there too, and shortly after booting, it was fine. So I went downstairs, logged onto my laptop and started an SSH session to my desktop. I typed in ’sensors’ and was again baffled by two CPU core’s running towards a temperature that can be used to boil eggs or make tea. Neither activity was one I had in mind for the inner workings of my computer.

Now this is where logging comes in. I remembered not noticing this problem before, and I generally keep a terminal open with a ‘tail -f /var/log/everything’ around, which means I can glare at whatever activity is being logged on my system anytime I need to. That too showed the overheating problem:

kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled

I keep backlogs, and I hadn’t gotten around to storing them in compressed format, so finding out when the problem first occured was a matter of

grep “Temperature above threshold” /var/log/everything.*|less

It soon showed me the first time this message popped up was “Nov 18 00:02:21″. So it must be caused by software installed on the 17th. Well, thank goodness, the package manager also keeps a log:

grep 2009-11-17 /var/log/pacman.log

I quickly spotted the possible culpret:

[2009-11-17 22:49] installed boinc (6.10.13-1)

BOINC runs continuesly, and hogs the CPU when it can like a maniac. Even though it also runs on my laptop and causes no temperature problems there, this seemed like the most likely cause. So I shut it down and immediately saw the CPU temperature drop below threshold values. I immediately disabled BOINC from starting at boot, and I’m going to look into this problem some more further along the way. BOINC should not have this effect on my CPU, or any other process that uses up a lot of CPU power.

I know I’ve been tinkering with the ASUS software for my mainboard in the past (back in my Windows days) and perhaps I accidently overclocked it or something. I’m unsure. But it can’t hurt to turn it down a little and see how it goes. I just have to figure out how to do that while still using nothing but Linux.

To be continued…

Linux saved my desktop

I recently redecorated the room where my desktop is located, and shoved it under my desk to save room. One side was placed nice and tight against the desk, and I didn’t think twice about it. I was copying some files from my desktop to my laptop through scp (FYI: I only turn on my desktop when I need it, so it hadn’t been running for days on end) and when I needed some files from my external HD (which I haven’t added to fstab yet), I entered the command ‘dmesg’ to find which /dev file I needed to mount it by hand. But what flashed before my eye was

CPU0: Temperature/speed normal
Hol

CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 11339693)
CPU0: Temperature/speed normal
CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 11626826)
CPU0: Temperature/speed normal
CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 11916938)
CPU0: Temperature/speed normal
CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 12205933)

Holy crap, my CPU is overheating. To determine the severity of the problem, I quickly needed to setup lm_sensors. I’ve done it before, so no need to browse the net for a HOWTO… I simply ran the command “sudo /usr/sbin/sensors-detect”, hammered “yes” on my keyboard at every question and activated the sensors bootscript. Simply running the sensors command told me how bad it really was.

atk0110-acpi-0
Adapter: ACPI interface
Vcore Voltage:      +1.22 V  (min =  +0.85 V, max =  +1.60 V)
+3.3 Voltage:      +3.28 V  (min =  +2.97 V, max =  +3.63 V)
+5 Voltage:        +5.06 V  (min =  +4.50 V, max =  +5.50 V)
+12 Voltage:      +12.32 V  (min = +10.20 V, max = +13.80 V)
CPU FAN Speed:     2033 RPM  (min =  600 RPM)
CHASSIS1 FAN Speed:1240 RPM  (min =  600 RPM)
CHASSIS2 FAN Speed:4560 RPM  (min =  600 RPM)
CHASSIS3 FAN Speed:   0 RPM  (min =  800 RPM)
CPU Temperature:    +81.0°C  (high = +60.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
MB Temperature:     +38.0°C  (high = +45.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:      +98.0°C  (high = +78.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0001
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 1:      +98.0°C  (high = +78.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

My cores where severely overheated. When you see something like this, there is only one thing you can do – which I did; enter “sudo shutdown -h now” and go to the computer to determine the cause of the high temperatures.

As I reached the attic (generally not a place of extreme temperatures in the fall) and immediately noticed the problem. By placing the desktop against the desk, air had no chance of being sucked into the computer, and the temperature had risen accordingly. I moved the desktop away from the desk, and promised myself to keep an eye on the temperature when I would turn it on again. And I can now, because I configured lm_sensors…

I lost one of my AUR packages…

… which may seem like a bad thing, but it actually isn’t. I got this email earlier this week:

from http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=10148
sergej wrote:

moved to community

And here it is now. I also located it in ABS (where we can build the packages ourselves), and this was the PKGBUILD I found:

$ cat atop/PKGBUILD
# $Id: PKGBUILD 2894 2009-09-22 17:24:48Z spupykin $
# Maintainer: Sergej Pupykin <********@gmail.com>
# Contributor: John Gerritse <********@gmail.com>

pkgname=atop
pkgver=1.23
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc=”A system and process level monitor.”
arch=(i686 x86_64)
url=”http://www.atcomputing.nl/Tools/atop/home.html”
license=(‘GPL’)
depends=(ncurses)
source=(http://www.atcomputing.nl/Tools/atop/packages/$pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz Makefile.patch)
md5sums=(‘ba1d733b9f0fcf8469a8e6c8e4d2d3b7′ ‘47b6d60a5fcb788d7bfb1600c3a71e81′)

build() {
cd $startdir/src/$pkgname-$pkgver
patch -p0 -i $startdir/src/Makefile.patch ||return 1
make || return 1
make DESTDIR=$startdir/pkg install
}

W00t! My name forever embedded in Arch… somewhere.

You can also find my name somewhere in the Gentoo package repository… yes, in there for atop as well. What can I say? I like atop. It’s a good tool, and it’s written by someone who was (and still is) a teacher at a computer training company where I took my first UNIX classes, and he was my first teacher ever there. So if it is not in a repo in your distribution of choice, get it in there! It rocks!

To print or not to print…

Using only Linux so far has been great. I’ve not come round to doing a lot on my PC, since I started a new job as a (Linux) sysadmin since November 2nd. In fact, I’m the only sysadmin and they need me to set up their entire infrastructure. ANyway, I have been doing a lot of installing and configuring, but on the Toshiba Satellite L550 they provided me. Vista was never booted, I immediately slammed in a Arch install cd and got jiggy with it. I always work with Linux on my desktop professionally, because I think it is ridiculous to administrate Linux servers from a Windows workstation. I’m much more efficient on Linux.

Anyway, I got XFCE4 (my favorite window manager) up and running, installed Firefox and got both sound and my webcam working without any hassle. Sweet.

Now, onto my printer. I’ve got a HP Photosmart C5280 that can scan, print and do some other stuff. Well, I need it to do that under Linux as well. So let’s get started. First, no need to reinvent the wheel. That is why there are HOWTO’s. I’m a sysadmin, so being lazy is just me being efficient. So, first I need CUPS (and some other stuff. So I go to my prompt and type in:

yaourt -S cups ghostscript gsfonts gutenprint

I added gutenprint because it is needed to print from The Gimp (a great image editor I even used on Windows). I looked up my printer in the OpenPrinting database and guess what… “works Perfectly“. This is including the scanner. This page also mentions what driver to use, which is’hpijs’. Unfortunately, this package is unknown to Arch, but there is a good chance the driver I need is in either of these two packages;

$ yaourt -Ss photosmart
extra/hplip 3.9.10-1
Drivers for HP DeskJet, OfficeJet, Photosmart, Business Inkjet and some LaserJet.
extra/hpoj 0.91-13
Hewlett-Packard OfficeJet, PSC, LaserJet, and PhotoSmart printer multi-function peripherals (MFPs) drivers

My first guess was the hplip package, which was correct. I had installed it, started the CUPS daemon, pointed my browser towards the ‘website’ http://localhost:631 and after two clicks ran into this screen:

CUPS found my printer without any problems!

After completing setting up the printer (which was a breeze), I went to the ‘Print’ tab, and selected ‘Print Test Page’ (under maintenance). My printer jumped to life, and spat out a test page in seconds. Now, my Linux desktop was ready to print, and with a few minor tweaks to /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, so was my laptop.

But here is the catch; I am 100% Linux. My wife isn’t.

She’s not a Windows lover, don’t get me wrong. She just has a Dell laptop that came with Vista and she is used to it. All she needs is a browser and a file manager, and she’s happy as a clam. I’ve tried to convince her that Linux has these things (and more) but she won’t let me touch the OS on her laptop. She also likes to print sometimes, and that is the catch. Linux systems can print through CUPS. She needs a system Windows understands… Enter Samba. <<to be continued>>>

Splish Splash

I love shiny boot sequences. Although seeing every service start in plain text is pretty cool, I also to see a pretty picture and a bar filling up towards boot completion (in other words; eye-candy). So today was Splash-screen day.

Getting a splash screen working may seem like a lot of trouble, but actually in Arch, it’s about 15 minutes of work. First you need to setup Uvesafb. Install the v86d package, add a word to a config file and regenerate your initramfs with mkinitcpio. Actually, I skipped that last bit, because when you complete installation of your splash screen, you need to regenerate your initramfs with mkinitcpio, so I’m saving myself the trouble of doing it twice.

Next step was to install the splashy-full package and a few Arch theme packages for it, add two words to the kernel line in /etc/grub/menu.lst, add a value to /etc/rc.conf, add “splashy” to the HOOKS and set the proper theme in /etc/splashy/config.xml.

Now I simply regenerate my initramfs with

$ mkinitcpio -p kernel26

and reboot.

As my system booted, I was greeted by a nice Arch Linux logo and a bar filling up as my system worked it’s way towards starting Slim.

What made you switch to Linux?

I came across an interesting post on the Arch forums this morning, and pondered over my Linux history after reading some of the replies. This is what I posted:

Well, I was introduced to Linux shortly after starting my career as a sysadmin in ICT, some 10 years ago. I never did like Windows very much, and Linux was new and interesting to me. As I began to learn more about it, I found the way things were organised, the way things work totally and completely logical. It all made sense, and I found it relatively easy to grasp. Learning Linux was not only fun, but all the pieces of the puzzle I came across fit perfectly into each other.
I remember going to one of the large bookstores in Utrecht to buy SuSE 6.2 (and later 6.4 and 7.0) when it was released (I was seriously starting to use Linux in those days, but still used Windows as well). Back then we didn’t have (A)DSL connections and sucking an ISO through a 56k modem connection was not really something you wanted to do. I stuck with SuSE quite a while.
Later on, when I got an ADSL connection to the internet, I downloaded distro’s like Debian and Redhat to give them a try. I did not like them. I moved on to Gentoo because I wanted more control myself, less GUI tools that did things I did not know about. Gentoo was perfect for me, although compiling everything took a while. I used Gentoo for three or four years, but after new releases of software severely broke my Gentoo installation, I got fed up and went looking for something new. I again tried many other distro’s, but none gave me what I wanted. Then I tried Arch. To me, it was like Gentoo – I controlled what packages were installed and how the system was configured – but without the hassle of having to compile everything. It used to take me three days to get a working desktop environment (XFCE4, Firefox, Gimp, OpenOffice etc) with Gentoo, and with Arch it took me only a few hours. I fell in love with Arch, learned to use AUR, and started adding some PKGBUILD’s of my own in there.
Recently, my XP box needed a reinstall again, and I figured I might as well give Windows 7 a try. Even the Vista haters (I am one of them) were enthusiastic about it, so why not? Well, I installed it (the RC version), and it could not even recognise my wireless card (a Realtek 8187 that has been supported by the Linux Kernel for almost 2 years). I laughed, shook my head and installed Arch on the system, and have not run into anything that makes me regret making that decision. Linux is the only OS for me now, and I doubt I will ever install any version of Windows on any system of mine.

Bring out your desktop

I’ve already mentioned I installed XFCE4. I love that window manager. It’s lightweight (I’d rather spend my resources on useful stuff like games, rendering etc, in stead of how my desktop looks), easily configurable, and very, very configurable. I think the only time I will ever not run XFCE is when I’ve succesfully created a working FVWM setup, which will take a lot of time and is a nice long term project.

Back to XFCE. I’ve installed it, added a few buttons, activated the compositor, added shading, opaque windows, etc. I’ve moved the default bar to the top and installed wbar and wbarconf. Wbar is the thing you’ll notice in the bottom of the screenshot of my desktop, and wbarconf will allow you to easily configure it (and save you a whole lot of time typing entries into a plaintext config file (namely ~/.wbar). The bar you see there is the standard bar without modifications… give me a while and it’ll be different.

Here's my current desktop; XFCE4, urxvt and wbar (not configured yet)

My Xorg config is also doing nicely. My PC has a nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS which is running quite smoothly with the nVidia drivers, as you can see from the output of glxgears.

Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
54095 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10818.773 FPS
54137 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10827.212 FPS
54162 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10832.344 FPS
54138 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10827.483 FPS
54000 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10799.855 FPS

I’m having a lot less luck wiht the Ati Radeon HD 4650 card in my (work) laptop, which does not support OpenGL with the open source drivers, and the Catalyst drivers (also not providing full support) will require me to downgrade xorg-server (which I do not feel like doing at this time). A few years ago, nVidia provided poor Linux support for their cards, while Ati was great at it. Somewhere along the line, I think Ati dropped the ball, and nVidia picked it up and ran off with it. Off course, I’m no graphic cards expert, so tell me if I am wrong. Anyway. when I run an OpenGL screensaver (or something else that needs OpenGL) I can litterly count the frames… out loud… slowly… with a stutter. When I run the same app on my desktop PC, it runs smoothly and looks great. Well, at least that is the computer I mostly game at. My boss actually expects me to work during office hours on that laptop. The nerve of some of these employer people…

Well, I’m just working on tweaking it a bit, installing all the software I need, and creating icons for them. I am looking in getting AIGLX to work, but I’ll try that in a couple of weeks. First I want my PC to work the way I need it to work. After that, I’ll tweak and tinker with it some more.

Damn, this is fun!

Registered Linux user

To be a truly 100% Linux person, I figured I needed to get registered as a Linux user. Luckily, I remembered encountering such an initiative many, many years ago. So I Googled and ended up at http://counter.li.org. I registered and became the proud owner of this certificate:

I then registered my laptop (the one my new and very nice boss gave me) which received registration number #411466.

Yes, I know it’s perhaps a bit silly to register yourself and your hardware, but hey… it’s fun!

Some Linux software is ridiculously overpriced…

At work we are considering switching from CentOS to Ubuntu server. I came across a piece of software named Landscape, which looks quite good. It allows you to manage the packages on your servers from a web interface, deploy software on all servers and it has build-in monitoring. There was no price listed anywhere, so I contacted them, asking what it would cost to run a dedicated Landscape server in our own network and have 9 servers connected to it. This was the reply:

Thank you for your query and interest in Ubuntu and Landscape.

The list price for 9×5 Ubuntu server support is USD 750, and USD 2,750 for 24×7 support.

This list price for Hosted Landscape it is USD 150 per client. For the on-site version, there are 2 components to the price:
1) Landscape Dedicated Servers: USD 10,000 for installation of 2 servers and 24×7 support coverage of the servers
2) Landscape client agent: USD 150 per client

All prices are annual fees. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any other questions about the features of these services.

I don’t care how handy Landscape seems, it’s ridiculously overpriced IMHO.

I guess I’ll stick to my previous plan; manual package management (or write a few bash scripts around aptitude) and use Zabbix for monitoring.

Moving on…

Oh boy, was I pissed and disappointed. In the week that Windows 7 was released in the Netherlands, I decided to give it a try. I’ve been running XP since SP2 (and Windows 2000 before that) and let’s face it; XP is an 8-year-old OS and it’s starting to show. I hated Vista (who didn’t) and I think it’s not a well thought through product. Frankly, I think it’s a bloody waste of hard drive space. Microsoft should pay people to use it, not the other way around.

But Windows 7 promised to be different. I noticed reviews which were quite positive and seemed to portray an OS that Microsoft seriously looked at – for the first time in a long, long time. Users, even die-hard Vista haters liked and even loved it. Well, I had the Windows 7 RC on my hard drive, my XP installation desperately needed a reinstall, and I would start a new job on monday with a big chance of a Windows 7 system here and there in the company (even though I am a Linux sysadmin). Why not try it?

So I installed the bugger, rebooted twice (yeah, I know, typical Windows install) and then glared at my shiny fresh install. The desktop lacked much cluttering and a lot was neatly hidden from view, but not impossible to reach on first glance. Nice. First things first, let’s get my network running. I have a wireless WPA2 network and my PC has an onboard Realtek 8187 card. To my surprise, Windows 7 doesn’t seem to come with drivers for this simple and common card. I had a few drivers lying around on my external hard drive, and even though none were for W7, it seemed to be able to use them. The drivers were installed, the card seemed to pop to life. I connected to my wireless lan, entered the pass phrase and…. Couldn’t connect. I hit the troubleshooting option Windows presented and after re-initializing my card and failing to connect yet again… it blamed my perfectly working wireless router (which worked, because my wife on her Vista laptop seemed to have no problems with the network).

Seriously, why doesn’t a shiny new OS recognize a wifi card that has been supported by the Linux kernel for almost 2 years now? Things slowly started to boil inside my skull. Now, you must understand; a few years ago, I wanted to drop Windows all together, but back then failed because I could not replace some of the apps I enjoyed with Linux equivalents. Also, most games I played didn’t work very well under Linux (using wine). But technology – including Linux – has grown in the past few years. Slowly, it started to dawn on me that perhaps now the time to drop Windows had come. That the fast and immediate failure of W7 to connect to a basic wifi lan using a common wifi card was a sign of the Gods, telling me to get the hell out of dodge, and start enjoying life on the GNU side of it.

I slapped my Ubuntu 9.10 live cd in the DVD drive, booted, connected to my wireless lan (no problem for Ubuntu) and pointing my browser to WineHQ. I went to the AppDB, entered my current favorite games, and then decided to go for it.

Next thing going into my drive was the latest core install cd of my favorite Linux flavor; Arch Linux. I partitioned my hard drive, making sda1 my /boot and sda2 my /, and using LVM2 to create partition for the rest of my filesystem. From there on I booted into my fresh install, got the network up and running with netcfg and finally, installing Xorg and my favorite desktop environment; XFCE4.

Now, I was ready for my adventures into a world where Linux would run my software and Windows would not be present on the partitions of my hard drive…