Thought I’d share a little taste of what I’ve done today… 
Archive for April, 2011
Yay! CyanogenMod 7 is stable!
11
Apr
I just saw in my RSS reader that CyanogenMod 7 is now stable. Fantastic!
I was running an Elelinux variant which was based on RC’s, with both good and bad results. Right now I’m waiting for my newly flashed Hero to boot up so I can see what the clean CM 7 has to offer.
It’s a good day, even though it’s Monday…
PS. Damn cool boot animation on it…
Edit: Need to download and install the google apps separately, I grabbed the CM7 gapps from here.
Intel 120gb SSD vs. WD 160gb 7200rpm
06
Apr
I’m considering switching the old harddisk in my wife’s laptop to a SSD, but like in most things in life: there’s way too much to choose from for the uninitiated. A co-worker was kind enough to let me try out his “old” Intel SSD (which is about a month old or so), thanks Leon.
So, since the dear local government is busy with the usual all-important-life-or-death surfing for the evening I spent a few minutes switching the drive into my own laptop for comparison. I can’t say that it’s very scientific measurements, but at least I can say there’s some crystal clear differences between the two.
I did a fresh Ubuntu Desktop 10.10 installation on the SSD (which btw, took just a few minutes) which I compared against my current Ubuntu 10.10 installation on the 7200 rpm 160 gb Western Digital. Yes, yes – I’m aware that I’ve got a bunch of custom configuration things and services on the “real” HDD and absolutely nothing but a clean installation on the SSD.
Harddisk models:
Intel SSD 2.5 inch X25-M 120GB MLC SATA300 (SSDSA2M120G2GC)
Western Digital HDD 160GB SATA 7200 rpm (WD1600BEKT-60F3T1)
(I’ll just call them SSD and WD respectively, because the full names are a mouthful to say the least.)
Time to login screen from power on
WD: about 44 seconds
SSD: around 19 seconds
I used the disk utility included with Ubuntu for the read tests.
Min read speed:
WD: 40,3 mb/s
SSD: 137 mb/s
Max read speed:
WD: 87,8 mb/s
SSD: 140,6 mb/s
Average read speed:
WD: 67,0 mb/s
SSD: 139,4 mb/s
Starting to see a pattern?
Here are the mandatory screenshots of the performance tests:
WD 160gb 7200rpm info
WD 160gb 7200rpm performance read test
Intel 120gb SSD info
Intel 120gb SSD performance read test
Edit: Added another screenshot of an old Hitachi 160gb 5400rpm IDE drive, accessed via USB.
Hitachi 160gb 5400rpm IDE read performance
Froyo… again
06
Apr
I re-flashed my HTC Hero (again) today. I saw that Elelinux Hero ROM v.7 had reached RC4 and thought “Ooh, this has got to be better than RC2″ (which I was running before that).
I could not have been more wrong. The onscreen keyboard did not work in the Market, unable to select any option in the reboot menu… Thank god it’s so easy to install Eclipse and the Android SDK on linux these days. One ./adb shell and one reboot recovery later I was back in charge of my Hero.
I’m now back to Froyo (2.2.1) again. This time though I went with Elelinux speedmachine v2. So far it seems to perform okay, I can’t say that I’m expecting miracles from the Hero, speedmachine or not.
Thought I’d upload a few screenshots of it.
New Natty Server
05
Apr
That’s Natty Narwahl, as in Ubuntu Server 11.04, not a typo of “nutty”.
I figured that since I moved my blog and some other webby stuff over to the Mac Mini, I’d take the opportunity to try out some different configurations and distros on my old webserver.
ClearOS 5.2 SP1
It took a few tries to get the installation about right. Oddly, I missed DHCP from the installation and had to add it afterwards via ssh from my laptop (yum install app-dnsmasq did the trick). Was a bit of a hassle to get most of the things I wanted in place, but due to the lack of all the configuration-files I am used to I decided to throw ClearOS in the bin.
Ubuntu Server 11.04 a.k.a. “Natty Narwahl” (x64, beta1)
This felt a lot more like home. Admittedly, I had all but forgotten about the usual problem I encounter when I install Debian or Ubuntu on this machine, all because of the integrated GeForce 6150 LE… what happens is I get a black screen after the grub-menu. I tried a bunch of different “solutions”, which in turn only messed up my installation even further. After about 2 hours I figured it’s easier to just start over.
Next round I did a software raid, which I regretted about 15 seconds after it finished partitioning and started installing. So, now the server is up and running in it’s third Natty-incarnation for today. For once I actually took the time to plan the partitioning a little bit better than I usually do (read: I didn’t hit “Use entire disk” within the second it comes up). Ended up with 4 partitions (/boot, swap, / and /home) split over 2 disks. So far, so good.
Typically I like to just select the preconfigured tasks which are predefined (LAMP, Samba, DNS, etc) and then spend a few hours afterwards installing all the things I need, can’t live without and whatnot. I was a bit pleasantly surprised by the manual select-option, so I spent 20 minutes selecting packages I know I need and saved a bunch of time once the installation was done. Yay me & hooray.
DynDNS?
I have to love the repositories for Ubuntu, when things like ddclient are readily available. Oh, speaking of ddclient and dyndns, they have a really nifty feature on their site which lets you create the ddclient.conf -file online and then just copy-paste in the correct configuration on your box. Log in to dyndns.com and go to: Support -> Tools -> Update Client Configurator (direct link).
That’s it for today.
