Random thoughts of a Linux sysadmin
I just finished migrating this website to a new KVM virtual machine. The virtual machine is running Mandriva Cooker (2010.0) now with kernel 2.6.31-rc9 and the virtio drivers. The host machine is a HP DL185 G5 running Debian Lenny (kernel 2.6.26) and kvm 85.
During the next days, there might be some short downtime now and then while I continue configuring things
Two weeks have passed, so it’s time for a Mandriva Cooker update again. There were lots of interesting changes in Cooker during this period:
Also Mandriva Linux 2010.0 beta 1 was just released. If you want to help testing, now is the right moment to help testing all these new features. As always: don’t run it on mission critical systems yet, because there will be bugs. Report bugs you discover on Mandriva’s bugzilla.
A quick update about my Flash rant from some time ago.
Today I wanted to listen to the music tracks on http://www.myspace.com/officialdaan. Because of all the annoyance with the Flash plug-in, I had removed it in May, and haven’t looked back since. Now I heard that there was a new pre-release of the Flash 10 plug-in for Linux x86_64 and some people said that it was working fine. So I thought this was the right moment to give it a try again.
What happened when I try to load the MySpace music player with this plug-in installed? As it did already months ago, my browser completely crashed. I wanted to know the cause of this, and so I ran firefox -g from a terminal. When it crashed, I was greeted with this error: “illegal instruction”. So it seems Adobe’s 64 bit Flash plug-in, actually does not work on all x86_64 systems and requires some newer instructions which my AMD Athlon 64 3500+ does not support (I guess it requires SSE3 or something similar) to work. Hence the browser crash when loading any Flash animation.
Then I tried on another machine, where I have the 32 bit plug-in with nspluginwrapper installed. I click on the FlashBlock icon to start the MySpace music player, but it does not appear at all. The Youtube videos on the same page, load fine though.
So, two systems, and two times Flash is not working as it should. I’ll happily remove it again, because no Flash plug-in is at least better than a non-working and potentially browser crashing Flash plug-in.
There were a lots of package updates in Mandriva Cooker during the last two weeks, amongst others because of rebuilds of all Perl packages. Currently a complete rebuild of all packages in the Main repository is going on. Here’s a list of some more interesting changes:
An update of the noteworthy Cooker changes was long overdue. Here’s a short, incomplete summary:
My Mandriva 2009.1 system at home had become a bit slow lately, and so I decided to do some attempts to make it a bit faster again. This is not the most powerful system anymore (Asus A8N-SlI NForce4 motherboard, Athlon 64 3500+, 3 GB RAM, 250 GB SATA-1 disk, NVidia 6600 GT graphics card), but it sometimes felt very slow because of lots of disk activity, especially during start-up. I succeeded in improving the performance noticeably: the disk activity now stops much earlier after log-in and after starting Evolution.
I did some different changes at once and have not always measured what was the impact of each individual change. So your mileage may vary.
$ evolution --force-shutdown
$ for i in $(find ~/.evolution/mail -name folders.db); do echo "VACUUM;" | sqlite3 $i; done# tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/device
# fsck -pDf /dev/deviceAfter all these changes, my system feels much snappier now than one month ago.
Since two days, I have merged the main servers used by two research laboratories at work. One server was an old Linux server which really needed a hardware upgrade, and the other one was a Mac Pro machine running a flaky OS X Leopard. The new server is of course running Linux: Debian Lenny.
It was a very interesting experience: working out procedures to migrate the mailboxes (from Dovecot on the Linux server and Cyrus on the Mac server to Cyrus on the new server), finding out how to set up one NIC in two different subnets (especially the routing is a little bit tricky), getting all services hooked up to LDAP and managed by GOSA, getting dhcpd to do exactly what we want in a shared-network set up, and much more.
The new server is a HP DL185 G5 with an AMD Opteron quad core CPU and 8 GB of RAM and hosts two KVM virtual machines, one for public services and another one running internal services. You can visit the two websites, which are also hosted on this machine of course, of the concerned research labs:
Maybe in the not too far away future, I should try to move the services hosted on the underpowered desktop machine running this website, also to a virtual machine…
It’s a long time ago I posted something on my blog, so this is a good moment to break the silence with a Cooker update:
And of course much more I forget :-)
Here’s a short update of some interesting package updates in Mandriva Cooker since the last update:
And of course there were many other changes, totalling to more than 900 package updates. To see the full list, consult the changelog mailing list archives.
Dear Adobe,
You are the developers of the successful Flash plug-in. Your plug-in is successful in the sense that it’s almost impossible to browse the web without having your plug-in installed. Flash is widely used for movie clips, web radio, informative animations, navigation menus, stock graphs, ad banners and many more. Some sites are even written completely in Flash.
For that reason, I have been using Flash for many years on my computer systems. First I used it on Windows and later on Linux, which I strongly prefer now. In all those years, I have had many problems with your plug-in.
When I was using Flash (I think it was version 4) on Windows 98 on my trusty Pentium II 350 Mhz, full screen Flash sites would make my computer very unresponsive. It also happend to me and also to a friend that different Flash versions were installed together, probably one we downloaded from Macromedia’s site and another older version which was included in some software, probably Microsoft Encarta. Because of these conflicting versions, we had Flash immediately crashing our browser when visiting certain web sites.
Then when I moved to Linux, there were times that I could not visit certain web sites because they required a newer Flash version which was not yet available for my OS. I also could not use my distribution’s package manager to install your software, because you did not permit others to include your software in my distro’s online repositories.
A few years later, I built a new machine with an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor. I installed a 64 bit Linux distribution, but there was no 64 bit Flash plug-in. I contacted your company Macromedia, creator of the Flash plug-in, to request a 64 bits versions of the plug-in, but I did not receive any positive answer, in spite of many other people requesting the same thing. Fortunately, the number of sites which were totally unusable without Flash, were not that high, so I accepted to live without your plug-in. One more year later, nspluginwrapper was born, and finally made it possible to view Flash animations on my 64 bits machine again.
In 2007, I started using an Apple PowerPC machine at work. Because Linux was (and currently is) still my preferred OS, I installed Debian GNU/Linux on this machine. But again, no Flash plug-in was available for this system.
We are now May 2009. Many new Flash versions were released in all those years, and finally you started developping a plug-in for the x86_64 architecture. However, things are not much better yet. When I try to view a Flash animation with your 64 bit development version of the plug-in, my browser often crashes hard. If I try to use your 32 bit plug-in with nspluginwrapper, the plug-in itself is not very stable: often when switching tabs in my browser, Flash animations suddenly die and streaming video clips on some Belgian websites do not work at all: the video applet just shows it is buffering, but the video never comes up. The same thing works fine another machine I own. Maybe your plug-in does not work well together with the NVidia drivers, another piece of proprietary sofware I need on this system? Or maybe your plug-in needs some extra libraries which are missing on this system? Unfortunately, I could not find a complete requirement list for your plug-in. The requirements on your download page are very general; only in a blog posting I found that I also need Curl, but I do have libcurl4 installed in both 32 and 64 bit versions on my Mandriva system.
Today, I can only conclude that I’m fed up with this situation. In all those years, I have had lots of problems with your plug-in and with every new version, new problems were introduced. Not only does your plug-in have many problems, the use of Flash is preventing universal access to information for everyone, no matter what kind of system, OS or browser they use. I uninstalled your plug-in today on this system, and I will continue my quest against your software in full force. I will actively search for non-Flash web sites and promote these as alternatives to Flash based web sites. I will also actively promote alternatives to your technology. Good web sites should be based around real open standard file formats, which Flash most definitely is not.
I hope you, Adobe, will finally see the light some day, and start publishing a really complete specification of your proprietary format under a totally Free license and that you will actively support and promote Free Software implementations. However, until then, I see no other option than boycotting your software.
With kind regards,
Frederik Himpe
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