John Alberts' Blog

New Gentoo Home Page Coming Soon?

I saw a posting today on one of the Gentoo listservs about the recent lack of newsletters and website updates. Unfortunately, the lack of updates isn’t unusual, but I did pickup an interesting bit of information. It looks like there is a new index page coming soon to the Gentoo website. It looks like it’s just a matter of when it gets committed. The new page appears to provide automated news updates with information such as:

Combine your partition space with mhddfs.

As I was browsing the Gentoo forums today, I came across a very interesting post. A user had 2 partitions on different hard drives that he wanted to combine the space on. Ok, well the interesting part was one persons reply about a new fuse filesystem called mhddfs. He pointed out an article on debian.net that explained a bit about this new filesystem and how to use it. Sure, there’s multiple ways to combine the two drives, but this one is pretty intesting.

Conky now supports MOC player

So, I found myself tweaking my Conky rc file today. I’ve been using mocp for playing music becuase it’s a really lightweight, versatile and can run detached from the console. I really wanted to see my currently playing music info on my desktop in Conky, but Conky’s documentation shows no mention of any support for moc and thier are no mention of variables to use for the config. So, in doing some googling, I found a website that has a patch for moc support and also mentions that it’s been in Conky since September 28th!

Linux 2.6.28's five best features

Nice little summary of great features of the 2.6.28 kernel. I have to agree. I just installed the 2.6.28 kernel as part of my new Funtoo install a few days ago, and I haven’t run into any problems yet. I’m about to give ext4 a try. Hopefully all goes well. [excerpt] This Christmas Linux kernel release brings several great new features to Linux, and its improvements promise even more Linux desktop goodness in the future.

Huge List of Tips and Tricks

I can’t believe I never saw this before. Sourceforge has an absolutely HUGE list of tips and tricks. There’s hundreds of Linux tips and lots of programming tips as well.

Funtoo Articles

This is really old news, but it’s new news to me because I just noticed this. Daniel Robbins Funtoo site now has some articles on it that he recently created. Right now, he has posted some of the articles that we’ve previously seen on the IBM Developer Works website, but there’s also now a quide for installing Funtoo. Technorati Tags: gentoo,funtoo,linux

Using CPAN Unattended

CPAN is great for easily installing and updating Perl modules. I use it all of the time on my servers. It’s a lot easier than managing Perl modules through the systems package manager. The problem is, when you want to install or update a Perl module, it asks you if you want to follow and install all of the dependencies and the dependencies for that… and so on. Sometimes you want to be anal and make sure it doesn’t install any extra crap, but quite often, it would be nice to just have it install what it needs automatically, so you can walk away and do other things while it’s installing.

Quick and Dirty Linux Load Testing

Today I had a need to keep the load on a server at 20 for an extended period of time. I was doing this to test notification escalations in Nagios. So, I found a nice little program call cpuburn-in that will load a processor at 100%. It’s just a tarball with an executable and a single README file included. To run the program, call the executable and supply the number of minutes you want it to run.

Quickly get up to 5% more disk space from your ext3 volumes

I’ve seen many websites that have pretty much the same ext3 performance tips, but I just came across this one today that had something very useful on it. It turns out that the ext3 filesystem by default reserves 5% of the disk space of the volume just in case the volume fills up. This would allow the system to continue running and allow the root user to still log in and clean things up.