Boot Time Optimizations

These tricks will speed up boot time, some more than others. To start out, let’s mount all local devices simultaneously instead of in a sequence.

Look for this in /etc/init.d/localmount:

mount -at nocoda,nonfs,noproc,noncpfs,nosmbfs,noshm >/dev/null

and change it to this:

mount -aFt nocoda,nonfs,noproc,noncpfs,nosmbfs,noshm >/dev/null

Not only can you mount drives simultaneously, you can even start services simultaneously.

In /etc/conf.d/rc, change this:

RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="no”

to:

RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="yes”

Now that all services will start simultaneously and all drives will mount simultaneously, we need to go even further by running modules-update and env-update only when needed.

/etc/init.d/bootmisc

Change:

if [ -x /sbin/env-update.sh ]
then

ebegin “Updating environment”
/sbin/env-update.sh >/dev/null
eend 0
fi

to:

if [ -x /sbin/env-update.sh ]
then
if [ /etc/env.d -nt /etc/profile.env ]
then
ebegin “Updating environment”
/sbin/env-update.sh >/dev/null
eend 0
else
einfo “Environment up-to-date”
fi
fi

/etc/init.d/modules

Change:

ebegin “Calculating module dependencies”
/sbin/modules-update &>/dev/null
eend $? “Failed to calculate dependencies”

to:

if [ /etc/modules.d -nt /etc/modules.conf ]
then
ebegin “Calculating module dependencies”
/sbin/modules-update &>/dev/null
eend $? “Failed to calculate dependencies”
else
einfo “Module dependencies are up-to-date”
fi

Using rc-update

Gentoo has an unique initialization (init) system, but they have simplified it for users greatly. A great use of the system for a laptop is to use a different and minimized runlevel when on batteries as opposed to being plugged into an outlet. Runlevels may be changed while the machine is running or specified at a boot screen. Another situation is for gaming. If you don’t have much RAM and have unnecessary processes running, then it will slow your computer down slightly.

One of the best resources that tells you how to use rc-update and runtimes is right in the Gentoo handbook, or more specifically here

If you haven’t read all the extra documentation, I suggest at least skimming it. More to come, as usual, as I find it.

It’s looking great (pictures in link). I really do hope that the minor fix they talked about either in this one or the last will fix problems with Intel onboard video cards.

——————————————————————————–
- World of Warcraft Client Patch 1.2.3 (2005-02-15)
——————————————————————————–

PvP Duels
Dueling across factions remains intact in the patch, in consideration
of players’ desires to duel members of the opposing faction.

*This is a minor patch to address localization issues discovered
during the European beta test. These changes affect localized text
strings for French and German versions of the game only, and players
in other regions will not see any changes to the game.

——————————————————————————–
- World of Warcraft Client Patch 1.2.2 (2005-02-15)
——————————————————————————–

Paladin
Seal of the Crusader: Fixed a bug where damage per swing was
increasing instead of decreasing when Seal of the Crusader was active.
This resulted in a dramatic increase in damage per second (DPS) that
was unintended. The tooltip for the spell displays the intent of
the spell:

“Fills the Paladin with the spirit of a crusader, granting additional
attack power. The Paladin also attacks faster, but deals less damage
with each attack.”

The overall increase in DPS from Seal of the Crusader should only
result from the increase in attack power and not from the increase in
attack speed. We understand this is a significant decrease in the
power of this spell, but was a necessary bug fix to ensure both
overall game balance and the viability of different Paladin Seals.

Localization
- Various text strings and audio have been corrected for the French and
German versions of the game.

Macs
- Fixed a bug that incorrectly enabled the vertex animation shader
option on some GPU’s that do not support it. This bug was causing
player character models in-game and in the character selection screen
to appear invisible or distorted. The fix should benefit users with
NVIDIA GeForce 2MX or 4MX GPU’s and ATI Radeon 7000/7500 GPU’s. It
should no longer be necessary to manually turn off the vertex
animation feature on these systems - it should now be off and
disabled automatically.

Bug Fixes
- Group loot has been fixed to work as originally intended. It will now
work exactly like round robin does, with the exception that when an
item of threshold level or above drops, it will use the auto-rolling
system. (Prior to this fix, when in group loot mode, the round robin
system was only being used for items (all players could loot coins),
which was rather confusing).
- Fixed a group loot permission bug that was telling players they did
not have permission to loot.
- Fixed a bug that was causing the game to freeze when scrolling
through auctions in the Auction House.
- Murlocs play the drown animation when they die underwater now.
- Onyxia correctly hovers instead of standing in midair.
- You can target vocal emotes again.
- Pets and summoned creatures attacking enemies will now tap the
enemies for their owners.
- Fixed a bug with Troll Shamans and the Berserk ability. Troll Shamans
can only go Berserk when they are in the wounded state.
- Rogues now correctly gain Lockpicking skill from items picked in the
trade window.
- Quests that require you to follow/escort an NPC will only complete
when you arrive at the designated area.
- Horde and Alliance members cannot duel with each other regardless of
realm type.
- Herbs and mineral nodes will remain active if they are not fully
emptied.
- Fixed a bug that was giving higher damage-per-second (DPS) to
Steelarrow Crossbow and Blackcrow than was intended.
- Sell prices on Hypnotic Blade, Illusionary Rod, Mantle of Doan, and
Robe of Doan have been lowered.
- Players who have completed the quest to summon Kirtonos may now
obtain the Blood of Innocents from Doctor Theolen Krastinov.
- The tooltip for the Warrior’s Intercept ability has been updated to
reflect the proper rage cost. Using Intercept now requires 10 rage,
not 15 rage. The tooltip now accurately reflects that.

Beyond the gates of mighty kingdoms lies a vast, unexplored world. A world of honour. A world of mystery. A world of danger. This is the World of Warcraft. Blizzard Entertainment proudly invites you to join arms with thousands of brave heroes in an online world of unlimited adventure.

Be sure to check back often, as we’ll be updating the news regularly moving forward. In the meantime, we’ve posted some tips below to help you get started on your adventures.

Article.

It will be interesting to see how much of a success it is in Europe. As I suspected, their servers are seperate from ours.

KDE 4, the next major version of the Linux desktop KDE, is likely to start up and run faster due to changes that have been made to Qt, the graphical framework that KDE is built on.

The first beta version of KDE 3.4, the last release in the current branch, was released on Thursday. But this release is not as important as KDE 4, which is due out later in the year. A beta version of Qt 4, on which KDE 4 will be based, was released at the end of December, with a final version due in the first half of 2005.

Article.

Next year… I can’t wait.

The Linux desktop environment KDE is moving a little closer to Microsoft Windows as developers ready a release of QT, the KDE graphical framework, that will run natively on the proprietary operating system.

Ralf Habacker, a KDE developer who initiated a project to port the Linux desktop to Windows, said over the weekend that a native Windows port for Qt, the KDE graphical framework, will be released under the General Public License (GPL).

Article.

Too bad it won’t fix all the security holes, bad “spaghetti” code, and instability.

The beta closed just yesterday, but unlike how the Wish beta ended, in announcing the closing of the project, a release has been scheduled for Febuary 11th.

As previously announced the European servers have now been taken offline. We’d like to say a warm thank you to all those players who have spent many hours helping us to test the game and server performance. We look forward to seeing you all in game at the start of the real adventure on 11th February!

Source.

World of Warcraft has had a great amount of sucess in the Americas, selling well over 600,000 copies as of about a month ago, and looking extremely promising for all of Europe. Will they have to limit sales in Europe and improve servers first, such has been done in the Americas? We will see.

Click to enlarge:

It looks pretty cool to me and after I get a few scratches buffed off of the case, I’ll be pretty much done modding it. For a long time, at least .

A few months ago, VALVe announced that, after Half-life 2 was released, they would begin to create and release what they called ATI levels. These levels were to show off all the new features and speed of high-end computers and graphics cards.

After reading the announcement, I was a little disappointed that the levels are only for people with high-end computers and mid-end or low-end computer users can’t even download the levels for try. I think my X800 XT PE and 2.8GHz P4 (HT 800MHz FSB) is sufficient, but most out there don’t have anything snazzy, but still want to play games. However, from what I understand, they are short levels with high polygon counts where you walk around or something like that.

Here are some pictures (click to enlarge):

It may not be screenshots, but I’m imagining that it will be amazing.

I have installed the spam karma plugin and I hope this will solve some problems.

If you haven’t set up USE or CFlags, check out Gentoo’s main website, read the manual again, and check out some of the other documentation they have.

Free up Space

Deleting downloaded source code and package work directories is a good way to save a lot of harddrive space, while being risk-free. If you are a 56K user, skip this one, as it deletes files that may need to be downloaded again later. Personally, I use a cron job to do this, but you may use it any way you wish. Try this out for size:

rm -r /usr/portage/distfiles/* && rm -r /var/tmp/portage/*

For my cron job, I also update nightly:

emerge sync && emerge -uD world && rm -r /usr/portage/distfiles/* && rm -r /var/tmp/portage/* && shutdown -h now

Ccache

The next optimization came as a surprise to me. After over two years of using Gentoo, I have just realized that “ccache” is not installed on a system by default, but is defaulted to on in portage. Summary of ccache (taken from man):

DESCRIPTION
ccache is a compiler cache. It speeds up re-compilation of C/C++ code
by caching previous compiles and detecting when the same compile is
being done again.

It will only make a small difference in most cases, but go ahead and:

emerge ccache
emerge info | grep ccache
ccache -s

On “emerge info | grep ccache,” it should display the version and say “[enabled].” If not, be sure to add it to /etc/make.conf in your portage options.

Deltup

Installing and using deltup will give a great benefit to people using 56K or other low-speed internet connections. Deltup checks for differences in previously updated packages and downloads the new one, threading the old package into the new one, effectively reducing bandwidth by a large margin. Unfortuonately, deltup has become outdated, but there is a new project out that is kept up, so here’s how to get it up and running.

First, you need to know how to “inject” ebuilds into portage. Basically, you are adding your own package to the system. Open up /etc/make.conf and change the value of PORTDIR_OVERLAY. I suggest changing it to “PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/overlay/portage” and make sure that the directory exists.

It’s almost as easy as that. Just place your ebuild into the overlay directory and emerge the name of the package.

Read the official dynamic deltup server page for details in installing it.

Swap Management

The best way to have swap installed is having your root parition on one drive and swap on a completely seperate one, but that is not always possible with most users. For users who have kernel 2.6.0 and up, you can use a feature called swappiness.

Swappiness defaults to a value of 60 and is raised and lowered by editing /etc/sysctl.conf with:

vm.swappiness = x

It ranges from a value of 0 to 100. The closer to 0 you get, the more the kernel tries to free RAM before using swap. The closer to 100 you get, the more readily the kernel will use swap.

Portage Search Speedup

A simple and risk-free (easily removable) addition to portage is to use psycho to speed up searching.

Psycho should already be emerged in your system, but if it isn’t, just “emerge psycho” and then add the portion of code below to /usr/bin/emerge (+ denotes added code, do not actually insert a +).

import portage

#Revision
try:
import psyco
psyco.full()
except ImportError:
pass
#End revision

import emergehelp,xpak,string,re,commands,time,shutil,traceback,atexit,signal,s$
from stat import *
from output import *

Kernel 2.6.X

If you are still using kernel 2.4.X, I highly recommend the upgrade to 2.6.X. (gentoo-development-sources is good) 2.6.X improves system speed by a large margin, is more stable, and is being updated constantly. More on compiling the kernel can be found on the Gentoo forums or in the Gentoo documentation.

More optimizations coming as I find them.

Tested over three months at IBM’s Linux Test Integration Center (LTIC) by a seven-person team, the 87-page report [pdf] titled “Linux Security: exploring open source security for a Linux server environment” set out to test a wide range of open-source Linux products supported by IBM to see whether they could adequately protect a middleware environment. Only open source products were used.

The answer to this question was a resounding “yes", backed up by detailed technical description of the specification and configuration of the systems used in the testbed. Where alternative products were available to do a similar job, the report makes technical comparisons and comes up with judgments on their respective merits.

Article.

IBM is a large supporter of Linux, but not as Microsoft is with their “Get the Facts” campaign, claiming that Linux costs much more than Windows does overall. Sure, you need system admins with experience, but free vs. a hefty license for every copy installed does not compare.

IBM actually tested for security flaws, whereas Microsoft just hands out statements (undoubtedly paid statements) from companies who claim Windows costs more. This is an issue of security, not cost. Security overrides cost anywhere, even if Microsoft is correct about the cost (which they are not), Linux is still the better server OS.

I’ve been cutting back on computer time by personal choice and there are just some days I don’t have much time at all to be on AIM/MSN/Yahoo or anything of that sort.

So, here’s mostly what will happen:

Sunday - Mostly gone, maybe on before 4:00PM EST.
Monday - Same as sunday, except I might be on a little more than that.
Tuesday - Normal.
Wednesday - Not really on, see monday .
Thursday - See tuesday.
Friday - Depends on what I do.
Saturday - Most likely gone. See friday.

If you want to contact me:

AIM - CleteBlackwell
MSN - [email protected]
Yahoo - CleteBlackwell2
E-mail - [email protected] (you can use [email protected] if you like, I have 2 addresses, one being other, then another that’s more personal and then anything else goes to “[email protected]", which is a catch-all. [email protected] should work as well.)

By the way, happy Febuary . In January, I had a link to my Linux distribution choice post, where I had tons of hits from the single source of linuxtoday.com. Awesome .

I had a small talk to Jeremy Wright last night and he recommended playing with filters (about 45 of them passed the filters and I updated some of my custom-written filters and added them to the trackback.php file) and using Spammer Tar Pit, which is explained on the page as so:

What it does

If you have any IP numbers listed in your moderation_keys setting (that’s where you put the spam words in the Comment Moderation setting under Discussion Options), this plugin will check them against the current visitor’s IP number. If it matches, the visitor will get a delay (that’s the tar pit – it slows them down), then an “Access Denied” message. You can customize the delay time and the message of course. Advanced users can also add additional IP matches manually, should they so desire. You might want to do that in order to match against an entire IP block, for instance.

I think I’ll begin installing it now and see how it works out. I have a few IPs to block.

Revision: It’s installed, let’s try it out now .

Disappointed that their new article hasn’t been released yet (Tuesday, Febuary 1st, is two weeks to the day from the last section, whereas the second was posted exactly a month after the first), I remembered that Blizzard deletes irrelevant news postings from time to time.

Interestingly enough, the article about World of Warcraft being off of store shelves has disappeared from the main page and archive pages.

Is it selling again? We will see, it’s still out of stock on the Blizzard store.

I stand corrected. Blizzard’s store is now selling it and has it in stock (not for long, I would guess).