Skip to main content

Further adventures with OpenBSD - XFCE vs Gnome

So continuing the great adventure - recently whenever I've used Gnome there is a string of "Starting file access" or something similar that appears in multiple tabs down the bottom. This continues endlessly and the load on my Blade 1500 gets up to about 5 which is unacceptable. So I hit the net and looked into using something different. I found a great blog (which I neglected to bookmark or make any other notes about)  that explained a bit about how to do it. Basically I did this:

# pkg_add -i -vv pkg_mgr

which is an easy way to do searches and install large number of packages and then go to X11 and pick all the XFCE packages. How easy is that? Download and install and off you go. The load on my machine is:

angus@blade:~$ w
11:43AM  up 13 days, 21:04, 3 users, load averages: 0.71, 0.63, 0.59

With 792MB of RAM in use (of 2048MB) and this is with Firefox running while I write this entry. 

Overall I find XFCE to be more responsive than Gnome - which is hardly surprising and for the basic features I require it looks quite nice and drives quite well. 

I do tend to find that the machine struggles when I'm looking at various webpages on the net - it doesn't handle processor intensive work all that well - and after all, why should it? This computer is old and does only have 1GHz processors so it will go slow. As a basic server type machine - running with the encrypted file systems and the like with SSH access in, it's working quite well.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Plone - the open source Content Management System - a review

One of my clients, a non-profit, has a lot of files on it's clients. They need a way to digitally store these files, securely and with availability for certain people. They also need these files to expire and be deleted after a given length of time - usually about 7 years. These were the parameters I was given to search for a Document Management System (DMS) or more commonly a Content Management System (CMS). There are quite a lot of them, but most are designed for front facing information delivery - that is, to write something, put it up for review, have it reviewed and then published. We do not want this data published ever - and some CMS's make that a bit tricky to manage. So at the end of the day, I looked into several CMS systems that looked like they could be useful. The first one to be reviewed was OpenKM ( www.openkm.com ). It looked OK, was open source which is preferable and seemed to have solid security and publishing options. Backing up the database and upgradin

Musings on System Administration

I was reading an article discussing forensic preparation for computer systems. Some of the stuff in there I knew the general theory of, but not the specifics of how to perform. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that Systems Administration is such a vast field. There is no way I can know all of this stuff. I made a list of the software and operating systems I currently manage. They include: - Windows Server 2003, Standard and Enterprise - Exchange 2003 - Windows XP - Windows Vista - Windows 2000 - Ubuntu Linux - OpenSuSE Linux - Mac OSX (10.3 and 10.4) - Solaris 8 - SQL 2005 - Various specialised software for the transport industry I have specific knowledge on some of this, broad knowledge on all of it, and always think "There's so much I *don't* know". It gets a bit down heartening sometimes. For one thing - I have no clue about SQL 2005 and I need to make it work with another bit of software. All complicated and nothing straightforward. Irritating doesn&

Traffic Monitoring using Ubuntu Linux, ntop, iftop and bridging

This is an update of an older post, as the utilities change, so has this concept of a cheap network spike - I use it to troubleshoot network issues, usually between a router and the network to understand what traffic is going where. The concept involves a transparent bridge between two network interface cards, and then looking at that traffic with a variety of tools to determine network traffic specifics. Most recently I used one to determine if a 4MB SDSL connection was saturated or not. It turned out the router was incorrectly configured and the connection had a maximum usage under 100Kb/s (!) At $1600 / month it's probably important to get this right - especially when the client was considering upgrading to a faster (and more expensive) link based on their DSL provider's advice. Hardware requirements: I'm using an old Dell Vostro desktop PC with a dual gigabit NIC in it - low profile and fits into the box nicely. Added a bit of extra RAM and a decent disk and that&