And here it is, the final version of Owncloud-client 2.0 for Slackware x64 (build on a 14.1 x64 system).
Enjoy 🙂
Tag: linux (Page 6 of 6)
The problem
After upgrading an old laptop (HP nc8430) to a kernel from the 3.10 series, everything seemed to work fine, except for my wifi card (Atheros AR5418 Wireless Network Adapter [AR5008E 802.11(a)bgn]). Contrary to the previous kernels, after booting, the wifi led was dead, and I obviously had no connection with my wifi station. At first sight, I tried the wifi radio button, but that didn’t help, the wifi led stayed dead. Wicd could not find an active adapter.
Analyse this
When I ran lsmod , it showed me that all the required modules (the ath9k driver for the wifi adapter, wifi networking, 802.11, …) were loaded. When I ran iwconfig, it even showed me a wlan0 device, albeit not connected of course. WTF is going on ?
Ok, let’s see what rfkill says:
rfkill listI got a surprise: everything was blocked. I also have no idea why, but rfkill now showed me two wifi options: hp_wmi and phy0. I am pretty sure the hp_wmi thingie was never there before. Both of them were blocked (hard and soft), so I unblocked them:
rfkill unblock allNow when I ran wicd-client, it connected to my wifi station. The wifi led come on as well. Good, but now, how do we fix this permanently ?
Solution
It appears that the hp_wmi module (support for some HP keys) does not play well with the rfkill module (RFKill is a linux kernel subsystem that provides an interface through which radio transmitters in a computer can be queried, activated, and deactivated).
So, a simple fix is to prevent the hp_wmi module from loading. On a Slackware 14.0 system, this can be achieved by creating a hp_wmi.conf file, in /etc/modprobe.d/, containing the following:
############################################################################## # Do not edit this file; instead, copy it to /etc/modprobe.d/ and edit that ############################################################################## # Blacklist because interferes with wifi (wifi rf blocked at boot) blacklist hp_wmi
This solves my problem: the wifi card now works again straight after booting, just like it did before. If you’re facing the same problem, let me know if this fix also works for you.
If you like to make RDP connections to Windows machines from your Linux box, it is often convenient if you can set a few things right from the start. As such, I wrote a little shell script around rdesktop, in order to make life somewhat easier for me.
This script does the following:
- invoke rdesktop
- set the keyboard layout to Belgian AZERTY
- set the screen resolution to something that fits the screen of my laptop
- map a local directory so it is available on the remote Windows box
And here is the script:
#!/bin/bash
#-----------------------------------------
# simple wrapper for rdesktop
# set keyb layout on server to azerty BE
# set window size to 1370x840
#-----------------------------------------
if [ $# != "0" ] ;
then
rdesktop -k nl-be -r 'disk:homedrv=/home/david/' -g 1370x840 $1
else
echo "$0: No arguments were supplied. Please supply a valid target
hostname or IP address."
exit 1
fi
exit 0
The script must be invoked with one arument, the hostname or IP adress of the machine you want to connect to. I guess the script is simple enough to understand what it does. Adapt it to your particular needs, and I hope you like it.
Intro
In this post, I will compare 3 laptop harddisks, under Linux, using hdparm. So, this is by no means a professional review, but since hdparm is shipped with every goddamn Linux distro out there, it makes it very easy to compare my results with yours.
The 3 (Sata) disks are:
- Toshiba MK8046GSX :Â 80 GB, 8MB cache, 5400 rpm
- Seagate Momentus 7200.3 : 120 GB, 16 MB cache, 7200 rpm
- Samsung 840 series : 120 GB, 512 MB cache, SSD
So, the Toshiba and Seagate are “classic” mechanical harddisks, while the Samsung is a shiny new solid state disk. The 3 disks are tested on a Dell Latitude E6500 laptop, equipped with a Core2 Duo P8600 processor and 4 GB ram. It runs Slackware 13.37 x64, with kernel 3.7.1.
Test results
- Toshiba (5400 rpm):
[root@E6500 ~]$ hdparm -Tt /dev/sda  /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 3806 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1903.02 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 144 MB in 3.04 seconds = 47.40 MB/sec
- Seagate (7200 rpm):
[root@E6500 ~]$ hdparm -Tt /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 3822 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1911.02 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 236 MB in 3.02 seconds = 78.25 MB/sec
- Samsung 840 (SSD):
[root@E6500 ~]$ hdparm -Tt /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 3862 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1933.08 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 808 MB in 3.00 seconds = 269.00 MB/sec
The Samsung is cleary limited here by the Sata controller (Intel ICH9 Sata Raid controller), which is a Sata-300 controller.
Conclusion
Well, the results are hardly surprising: the old Toshiba is the slowest, the Seagate is significantly faster, but the Samsung simply wipes the floor with both of them. The Samsung plays in a whole different league, you can’t really compare them.
There is one thing to keep in mind when replacing your old hardisk with an SSD. The latest breed of SSD drives are capable of reaching sequential read/write speeds up to 500 MB/sec. That’s awesome, but it also means that your laptop will need a pretty recent Sata controller (to be specific, a SATA-600 controller) if you want to realise these high speeds.
Older laptops are equipped with SATA-300 or even SATA-150 controllers. This means that in reality, you will reach at most 270-280 MB/sec on a SATA-300 controller, which is still impressive, and up to 130-140 MB/sec on a SATA-150 controller, which still beats most, if not all mechanical laptop drives.
Consequently, on these older laptops, you don’t need the latest and fastest SSD drives available, because you will never get the most out of it. But don’t let this news spoil the fun, upgrading older laptops with SSD drives provides a very signifant performance boost, well worth the investment.