bobpeers -> blog

I have the 64 bit version of Fedora 12 installed into a virtual machine and the boot times are terrible. By terrible I mean anywhere from 45 seconds to just over a minute.

I’ve cut the starting services right back to the basics and set it to autologin but it still takes ages. It seems that even getting to udev takes considerably longer than it used to, plus there’s a very noticeable delay before X starts and the desktop is displayed.

For comparison my Fedora 11 machine (32 bit) running the same services regularly boot in 23 to 30 seconds.

It could be to do with the virtual machine since I has to create an xorg.conf due to a problem with Virtualbox guest additions and Fedora 12 but I doubt that’s the sole cause. I did read a bug report about probing for the floppy drive but that’s not my problem.

I’ll just hope that either a new version of Virtualbox or a future Fedora 12 update fixes this.

After trying Google Chrome OS I moved onto Fedora 12 in Virtualbox. As always it installed fine and in no time I was at the default Fedora 12 desktop. Next step was to install the guest additions to allow for screen resizing and seamless modes.

After installing and rebooting, my X server wouldn’t start. I dropped into a virtual terminal only to see that Xorg could not find any screens to use (Fedora 12 has no xorg.conf, it use HAL to detect the displays instead). This happens in both 32 and 64 bit versions.

It seems this is a general problem that can be fixed by creating your own xorg.conf with the required settings. The second link I provided has the fix.

I haven’t tried it myself yet but hopefully a new version of Virtualbox will soon fix the problem. It did occur to me that it would be nice if there were an easy way to uninstall guest additions to fix problem like this, at least then I could make a temporary fix to investigate the problem.

Well like many people this weekend I was busy downloading and installing the Google Chrome OS VMWare image file.

It’s easy to use the file in Virtualbox using these instructions from Tech Crunch.

But also like many other people I was getting nowhere trying to log in using my Google Account username and password. The errors indicates that it’s a network problem so the comments suggest using bridged networking instead of NAT but that made no difference for me.

Finally I found a post telling me to use chronos as the username and a blank password, bingo now I could log in. When logged in found my networking was fine and it makes no difference at all if I use bridged or NAT, both work fine.

One final point is that the default keyboard is set to US so if you’re keyboard is set differently (mine is DA for Denmark) be aware of this.

I’ll leave most of the obvious comments on Chrome OS to others, as there’s plenty been said on the subject. But for those that dismiss the OS I think it’s way too early for that.

I may not want it on my main computer tomorrow but combine it with a new laptop running an ARM processor,16 GB flash drive and another year or so of development as well as an asking price that undercuts current netbooks by miles (maybe $100 in the US) and I think there will be a huge market.

There’s a rather strange difference between using C#.NET and C++.NET when using a parameter query to insert a TimeStamp into an MS Access database (field type Date/Time).

The following C# code works perfectly.

OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand();
cmd.Parameters.Add("@login_timestamp", OleDbType.DBTimeStamp).Value = DateTime.Now.ToString();
cmd.CommandText = "insert into myTable values (?)";

However when converting the same code to C++ you cannot just use OleDbType::DBTimeStamp as this results in an error when inserting the data, instead you have to use OleDbType::Date so the code looks like this.

OleDbCommand ^cmd;
cmd=gcnew OleDbCommand();
cmd->Parameters->Add("@login_timestamp", OleDbType::Date)->Value = DateTime::Now;
cmd->CommandText = "insert into myTable values (?)";

If you have logrotate running on Apache log files or your IIS server creates a new log every day then you end up with a bunch of logs that have a similar name format. If you want AWStats to process a large number of these without you having to manually join them (using cat on Linux machines) then you should use the included file called logresolvemerge.pl included with AWStats.

To use this simply use this line in you config file.

LogFile="/usr/share/awstats/tools/logresolvemerge.pl /home/iis_logs/iis_logs/ex* |"

Here I’m using logresolvemerge to join my IIS log files in the format exYYMMDD.log. This line will feed all the log files from oldest to newest to AWStats so it can process them. It works incredibly well and is very fast.

I’ve used Chrome on and off in Windows for a while now but finally tried it out on Linux (Ubuntu 9.10 to be exact). It was easy to install the .deb file from Google and I had it running without any problems in less than a minute.

Feature wise it’s the same as the Windows version but the performance is fantastic, it starts in under a second and page loads take fractions of a second. The whole browser feels incredibly fast, in fact faster than anything I’ve tried before.

I recommend that if you’re running Debian or Ubuntu you should give it a try and see what you think.

I installed Ubuntu 9.10 into Virtualbox last night just to kick the tires so to speak.

The installation went very easily as to be expected from Ubuntu. There’s not many options to choose but even so it’s a very polished and smooth procedure.

My first impression of the desktop is that, like the installer, it’s very polished in appearance. I really like the new notification icons, they are very clear and more professional than before. My main comments are that it seems very responsive, there’s no delay when clicking on menus and applications open almost immediately.

I would say that Firefox opened from a cold start in about 2 seconds and even Open Office opened much quicker than I expect.

I tried to use bootchart to get a feel for how long the boot process took, but unfortunately even after multiple reboot it continued to report boot time of over 1 minute which I know must be wrong. My gut feeling is that the boot was around 25 to 30 seconds.

Having used Fedora for a few years now I don’t think I’m lightly to switch and I miss many things out of the box (there’s no GUI to control the firewall or services for example) that I’m used to in Fedora. Plus I like the ability to choose the install packages on the Fedora DVD instead of adding them later from the repositories.

Having said that, I think Ubuntu looks and performs great and the other distros can certainty learn a lot from Ubuntu 9.10.