bobpeers -> blog

After reading this article on optimizations made to Ubunbtu 9.10 in relation to the boot time I thought I would check this out in a virtual machine.

I understand that much of the work done will help when booting from an SSD drive and using a virtual machine adds an extra layer between the OS and the bare metal but I though it would be interesting to compare the boot time to Fedora 11, that I also have installed in a VM.

Setting Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 and Fedora 11 up in identical virtual machines, both set to auto login with bootchart installed I was very surprised by the results.

Ubuntu booted in between 1 minute and 1 minute 6 seconds while Fedora 11 booted in between 32 and 34 seconds. This is by no means a controlled test and Ubuntu is still in alpha status but I was pretty shocked by the results. Hopefully by it’s release it will be booting in the sub 30 seconds range.

My old laptop from 2003 runs the original Centrino (Banias) with a 1.3MHz Pentium M. Up till now it’s dual booted Windows XP and Fedora 9 but since I never use it I decided to wipe clean and just install Fedora 11.

It actually runs amazingly well on a full gnome desktop, it’s fast, responsive, boots in about 30 seconds and shuts down in about 5 seconds! I’m sure it actually runs faster than it did with the old install.

I’m pleased that a new OS still runs fine on an old laptop and despite the increasing size and complexity of the OS it doesn’t seem to have impacted performance.

Using Fedora 11 with the default settings it strikes me that although most of the interface and icons seems reasonably modern there’s a few glaring exceptions. See the image below from the Control Centre.

The ‘Network’ and ‘Network Device Control’ icons look like they haven’t been updated in years, in fact I’m sure they’re the same as when I started using Fedora Core 4. They’re not terrible but they certainly stand out as being different from the rest. Maybe Fedora 12 will show them some love….

I know there’s loads of forums full of the same question but I must admit that I cannot understand the services that run in a default install of Fedora.

Of course I’m specifically talking about ssh and sendmail. I’ve read plenty of comments theorising on the reason for the sshd daemon running, many talk about Red Hat being mainly installed on headless servers so you need to be able to log in over ssh after the install is complete.

If that’s the reason then that’s all well and good for Red Hat Enterprise Linux but I doubt the same is true for Fedora. Surely the vast majority of Fedora installs are personal computers and laptops where if you need ssh it should be up to you to start the service. Exactly the same is true for sendmail.

It’s been the same with Fedora since I started using it at Fedora Core 4 and it’s something I’ll never understand. At the very least it should be an option in the Anaconda installer if you with to run ssh.

Looking at the Fedora 10 feature list a couple of things caught my eye. A rather significant one, for new users especially, is /sbin sanity whereby /bin and /sbin will be added to the PATH for all users. This will certainly help people when they see commands such as this on a website and cut and paste it into a terminal expecting it to work:

service httpd start

Of course this doesn’t work out of the box in current Fedora releases (it’s /sbin/service). It’s a small change but will make Fedora a bit more users friendly for new users.

Another notable one is Better Start-up that aims to reduce boot times on Fedora. I’m really glad to see that a lot of effort is being put into this area and I know Ubuntu are doing the same.

There were some interesting tests done on Phoronix (see the Fedora and Ubuntu comparisons) comparing boot times over releases for Fedora and Ubuntu. As well as having a much faster boot time it seems that Ubuntu has been better at improving performance over each release, I hope Fedora can rectify this over the next couple of releases.

I read today that Gnome 2.24 has been released. There’s a few nice features but tabs in Nautilus seems like the one I’ll find the most useful (assuming you can drag files between tabs). Actually the biggest deal for many users will be that this 7 year old bug in GTK has been fixed.

Many people have probably encountered this bug when the mouse is hovering over the location of a button on a form that opens under the mouse. In this situation the button cannot be clicked until you move the mouse away and back over the button. It’s a really annoying bug and I’m glad it’s fixed.

Gnome 2.24 will be in Fedora 10 due to be released on 25th of November so I’ll have to wait until then for a test drive.

After living with no sound on flash videos since I installed Fedora 9 ( I don’t watch many videos as you may have guessed :-) ) I decided to look for a fix tonight. It turned out to be much simpler than I imagined, I should have done it ages ago!

For reference I had all other system sounds but the controls on the playback page of the Pulse Audio Volume Control just flickered.

Just install libflashsupport as root and you’re good to go.

# yum install libflashsupport

Found on this page, http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2007/11/firefox-no-sound-on-flash-videos.html.

I decided to switch to using nameservers from OpenDNS just to see if it made a difference compared to my ISP’s nameservers. You don’t need to sign up if you don’t want, you are free to just use their nameservers as you wish (which are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220).

The main problem is that I use Network Manager to control my network and if you try to edit the connection from Network Manager but still use dhcp then it will, by default, just get the nameservers from your ISP and ignore any other servers you manually add.

Fortunately the solution is very simple. As root open the file /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf (assuming your wired interface is eth0 of course) and add the line as shown.

# vi /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220; #add this line
send host-name "your-hostname";  # temporary RHL ifup addition

Next just restart your network.

# /sbin/service network restart

At this point I could not see my wired connection in Network Manager (the entry was greyed out) so I manually started the interface.

# /sbin/ifup eth0

This brought eth0 up and from then on Network Manager worked fine with the new nameservers. It might just be psychological but browsing does seems slightly faster, just a little bit less delay with each page load. I’ll leave it set up like this for a while to see how it goes, it’s easy enough to switch back at any time but for now I’m very happy.

Being the early adopter that I am I’ll be installing Fedora 9 within a day or two of it’s release.
There’s nothing like installing a new release over a perfectly usable, customised and stable system just so I have the latest and greatest :-) Still that’s the fun for me, plus it’s a great learning experience, you learn the most when things break.

I’ve been with Fedora since Fedora Core 4 so I’m pretty good at getting my settings back after an new version is released. Of course I backup all of my .conf files located in /etc/ and I also have a text file with notes since there’s always some things that I just can’t remember (usually with Apache and virtual hosts for some reason).

Over the years I must say that it’s become much easier, partly because I know much more but also because the installer and whole release cycle seems much more polished.

Gone are the days when you’d get missing dependencies using yum at least once a week or cryptic error messages when trying to partition the disk during install. It’s all very smooth and uneventful these days.

This is quite a compliment for how far Linux has come in the last few years, especially since Fedora is intended to be one of the more cutting edge distros.