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The Joy of Hardware
Monday, April 18th, 2005 08:55 pmEarly last week, my manager asked me how much RAM I had in my laptop. I told him 700 and change, but that it didn't usually seem to be a problem. I could even run two copies of Eclipse, Tomcat, plus email and web and only have significant slowdown when switching desktops.
Shortly thereafter, my computer started to run fairly slow. I said "Hey Aaron... since I told you I was fine, everything seems to be running slower." He said "That's okay, I ignored you and ordered a gig anyway."
So this afternoon I unscrewed the back of my laptop, removed the 512MB chip and installed the 1GB chip. I then restarted and discovered that my computer was only using 833MB of RAM. "That's an odd number," I thought, considering I have 256 builtin and just added another gig. After a few attempts to directly set the memory with the help of a developer with more Linux system experience than I, I decided I'd had enough with the Mandrake 10 install I'd done a year ago tomorrow. The fellow developer liked ubuntu ("Linux for human beings"). It's essentially Debian with up-to-date packages, which is what I wanted to install in the first place.
So I backed up the important stuff on my hard drive (surprisingly little, really), reformatted my FAT32 shared drive (since I never use Windows on this thing) and combined it with my /usr/ partition (which, by a terrible oversight in the original install was only about 3GB), and installed, which went quite smoothly.
We then had a dickens of a time trying to get my display settings right. My laptop's LCD only supports 1024x768, but I've got a 21 inch monitor I like to run at 1600x1200. Fortunately, X-Windows lets you have a desktop that's larger than your screen, so when I move my mouse around my desktop scrolls on the LCD and stays stable on the CRT. After much frustration we realized we could just edit the xorg.conf and manually set the screen resolution to 1600x1200 and, hey presto, the desired behavior.
We then fought with Evolution 2. I use Evolution because it has a module that talks to Microsoft Exchange, so it's the only client other than webmail I can use to read my email. Its architecture is rather finnicky, though. So it detected that I had setup from version 1.4 and kindly converted it for me, asking if I wanted to delete it ("no thanks, I'll see if you work first"). It refused to connect to Exchange, so I restarted it. It then refused to talk to my local folders. We eventually upgraded from CVS because the release version was busted.
After all of this, we decided to cat /etc/meminfo to learn that I still only had 833MB of RAM, even when we informed the kernel it could expect 1279. With a little probing of apt we discovered I was running a 386 kernel. So we ran apt-get install linux-image-686 (easiest damn way to upgrade an OS, eh?) and restarted. But now when GNOME started, the whole system would freeze. Aha -- it's missing the restricted drivers. apt-get the right version and hey-presto, I've got 1279MB of RAM. And, after 7 hours, I've also got a Linux install configured with the help of someone with experience (rather than my "That was a good idea in 1998 when I read the documentation..."). Hopefully I can make up those 7 hours in improved productivity quickly.
I will say this for Windows compared to Linux. It's a lot easier to get the former to do the right thing with hardware. However, the latter has a much easier time doing what I want with software. And once you've got the hardware working, Linux is a much better steward. I occasionally complain when I have to quit Eclipse after it's been running for two weeks. But then I realize if I'd been running Windows, I would've restarted the machine twice in that time span. Of course, with MacOS X I get the best of both worlds...
Shortly thereafter, my computer started to run fairly slow. I said "Hey Aaron... since I told you I was fine, everything seems to be running slower." He said "That's okay, I ignored you and ordered a gig anyway."
So this afternoon I unscrewed the back of my laptop, removed the 512MB chip and installed the 1GB chip. I then restarted and discovered that my computer was only using 833MB of RAM. "That's an odd number," I thought, considering I have 256 builtin and just added another gig. After a few attempts to directly set the memory with the help of a developer with more Linux system experience than I, I decided I'd had enough with the Mandrake 10 install I'd done a year ago tomorrow. The fellow developer liked ubuntu ("Linux for human beings"). It's essentially Debian with up-to-date packages, which is what I wanted to install in the first place.
So I backed up the important stuff on my hard drive (surprisingly little, really), reformatted my FAT32 shared drive (since I never use Windows on this thing) and combined it with my /usr/ partition (which, by a terrible oversight in the original install was only about 3GB), and installed, which went quite smoothly.
We then had a dickens of a time trying to get my display settings right. My laptop's LCD only supports 1024x768, but I've got a 21 inch monitor I like to run at 1600x1200. Fortunately, X-Windows lets you have a desktop that's larger than your screen, so when I move my mouse around my desktop scrolls on the LCD and stays stable on the CRT. After much frustration we realized we could just edit the xorg.conf and manually set the screen resolution to 1600x1200 and, hey presto, the desired behavior.
We then fought with Evolution 2. I use Evolution because it has a module that talks to Microsoft Exchange, so it's the only client other than webmail I can use to read my email. Its architecture is rather finnicky, though. So it detected that I had setup from version 1.4 and kindly converted it for me, asking if I wanted to delete it ("no thanks, I'll see if you work first"). It refused to connect to Exchange, so I restarted it. It then refused to talk to my local folders. We eventually upgraded from CVS because the release version was busted.
After all of this, we decided to cat /etc/meminfo to learn that I still only had 833MB of RAM, even when we informed the kernel it could expect 1279. With a little probing of apt we discovered I was running a 386 kernel. So we ran apt-get install linux-image-686 (easiest damn way to upgrade an OS, eh?) and restarted. But now when GNOME started, the whole system would freeze. Aha -- it's missing the restricted drivers. apt-get the right version and hey-presto, I've got 1279MB of RAM. And, after 7 hours, I've also got a Linux install configured with the help of someone with experience (rather than my "That was a good idea in 1998 when I read the documentation..."). Hopefully I can make up those 7 hours in improved productivity quickly.
I will say this for Windows compared to Linux. It's a lot easier to get the former to do the right thing with hardware. However, the latter has a much easier time doing what I want with software. And once you've got the hardware working, Linux is a much better steward. I occasionally complain when I have to quit Eclipse after it's been running for two weeks. But then I realize if I'd been running Windows, I would've restarted the machine twice in that time span. Of course, with MacOS X I get the best of both worlds...
