Kyle D. Skrinak

I did a poorly-advised thing — I upgraded my ubuntu production laptop to 9.04 on the day of its release. I have noticed that each successive kernel update pushed out of become increasingly reliable, and so my comfort level with performing low-level upgrades.

So far, the update has gone smoothly. I did a “best server” check prior to the update, and very interestingly the process returned a server at Duke University, a very close distance from my house. The downloading and staging for the update was fairly quick, about 90 minutes — not bad for “release day.” Perhaps the “best server” task netted me an advantage.

As for the upgrade process, I liked the diff options when upgrading the core components, such as mysql (my.cnf) and lighttpd (lighttpd.conf) so that I won’t lose customizations that I forgot about but use daily.

After the upgrade, I restart. There’s a new, smaller (or at least the display configuration better matches the display characteristics) progress display during bootup. ubuntu touts a quicker startup. I’m not seeing it, but I wasn’t looking for one, either. After bootup, I reapply my old changes to the new lighttpd.conf file, and all my local web apps run fine. Excellent. Moving on, I lost compiz (disabled) and had to modify my compiz.conf file to fix it. (editing at /usr/bin/compiz — but the change depends on your hardware) Losing my compiz settings is a minor annoyance but not too serious either.

To be continued…

Perhaps there’s a claim to this already; if not I’d like to offer a corollary to Godwin’s Law;

“When someone is losing a process-related discussion he will invariably invoke the number of years he’s been in his profession.”

I come not to bury fink, but to check macports out. If you look over my mac os x installation recipe (which is now more stained than my wife’s kitchen recipes thanks to all the changes) fink is remarkably out-of-date, often bested by Apple hosted binaries. It all begs the question, why keep using it? MacPorts, on the other hand, is the distribution system of choice at gimp, imagemagick, to name two quickly. Let’s see how it works; installing now.

I have an Apple iMac “Core 2 Duo” 2.16 20-Inch (late 2006) model that is showing a common issue with an overheated GPU: errant horizontal lines and other artifacts. The problem is heavily reported on the Internet, and even noted at a Wikipedia page for this model. There is no real fix, but I might have found a cure for the overheating: “SMCFanControl” which is a utility that lets a user increase the minimum defaults for fan speed. Apple hasn’t released the specs on what is officially an unacceptable threshold for heat, but if my GPU is at 135° F, I’m thinking that’s too hot. The chart on the right is made by “Temperature Monitor” another handy tool for this matter.

A dab will do ya — when I cranked the fan, the temperature drop was remarkable. However, I don’t need to keep them cranked; by setting the sliders to 1/3 away from minimum, (see second graphic) that change has stopped the errant graphic drawing issues — for now.

I was noticing odd jerky performance with Firefox 3.1b3 that wasn’t making sense. So I ran the SunSpider benchmarks on FF3.1b3 and FF 3.0.8 with Firebug on and off. FF 3.0.8 with FB on is faster (5308) than FF3.1b3 with FB (beta) on (8350) which was a bit of a shock.

I eagerly await the  official release of FF3.5 and the core add-ons updating to follow.