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Last night at an installFest, I helped someone with a Core i7, 6GB of RAM and 300GB free install Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity into a virtual machine. After the install, it was painfully slow. That is an understatement. Every character that I typed didn’t get displayed until about 30 seconds later. To the other person, it seemed that Ubuntu had locked up. He wanted to delete the Ubuntu install and leave. Clearly, something was broken. This was with 12.04.1 32-bit desktop inside the latest available VirtualBox on MS-Windows7 x64..

If I hadn’t seen this myself, I wouldn’t believe it either. Complete instructions follow to speed up VirtualBox for Ubuntu 12.04.1. It should work for prior versions and other Linux-based VMs too.

11/2013 Update

GPT or MBR? Which do you use for partitioning and why?

I haven’t decided yet. None of my HDDs are over 2TB, so GPT is not forced, but the limitations of MBR disk partitions is a real concern.

This article Make the most of large drives with GPT and Linux has me rethinking my plans to stay with MBR for new RAID1 drives. I have some external USB3 disks that may need to be changed too.

The real concern is an Ubuntu 10.04 Server might not support GPT well enough to be used. That machine has the RAID and external disks today. None of the drives involved will be used for boot, so that does remove THAT concern.

I could really use some help deciding. Thoughts? Suggestions?

I was reading a blog article by a former Gnome developer, Miguel de Icaza, What Killed the Linux Desktop.

He nailed it perfectly.

• Incompatible APIs between different distros
• Even different distro releases from the same team are often incompatible
• Lack of 100% binary compatibility for GUI programs across distros and releases

Until the main 3 distros decide to play nice and make a stable API for all layers available, with 100% binary compatibility for 5-10 years, there cannot be any traction for a Linux-based desktop.

Android is Linux, but it is Linux with a plan. That is why Android is winning more and more users, developers, corporate efforts.

Found myself needing a specialty product for that XBMC computer recently. Spent a few days doing research, thinking about it, then finally ordered directly from the main US distributor after getting an email from their sales team explaining a particular add-on that was required.

The cost for the items was reasonable, perhaps even a good value, we shall see, but when the shipping charges were displayed, something was wrong. I’m used to free shipping for my online orders, so seeing a $70 shipping option seemed completely out of place. Here’s the exact shipping prices offered:

• Next Day Air – $69.47
• UPS 3 Day Select® – $24.20
• UPS2Day – $31.24
• UPSGR – $10.92
  Toggle a switch to see other shippers, USPS in this case:
• USPS Priority (Domestic) – $9.62

UPS is sticking it to the little guys, unless this company has a $5 base handling charge. Priority (if it fits, it ships) seemed like the best answer and arrived quickly across the country.

Do people really pay $70 for next day shipping of tiny objects? I still have this idea of a FedEx envelope costing $12 for overnight shipping. Maybe the prices have increased? These items would easily fit into a padded FedEx envelope.

What do you typically pay to get something that fits in a padded envelope shipped?

This morning I was thinking about how long hard drives should be used. Seems that the disks spinning 24/7/365 in an array here were purchased in 2006, just under 6 yrs ago. The drives themselves have never caused any issues, though a loose SATA cable was problematic the first 12 months or so. Since then, that array has been working perfectly.

The OS boot HDD was bought a few months before the disks for the array.

Holy CRAP! Almost 6 yrs old! I’m afraid, very afraid.

The last few days, I’ve been building an AMD E350D-based system. This is a low-powered APU with on-board GPU for a mini-PC.

Had to get out the dremel to modify the case a little for improved cooling. Got the MB, PSU and all the connections together, hooked up a VGA cable, keyboard and mouse – then powered it on. Based on the PSU fan noise, it was a quad-Xeon server with 60+ HDDs spinning running 30 virtual machines with high-end gamers. Expected to see the BIOS screen.

I never did.

Sadly, it never got any quieter either. This PSU may be replaced with an 80+ Seasonic Flex-ATX PSU quickly. I think the entire system might need 100W peak.

RAM?

Ok, perhaps the RAM is shared for the GPU … fine. Reading the fine print – it uses DDR3 RAM, not the DDR2 I’d planned to reuse. This is a low power system.

Ordered from a nearby computer store, just need to drop by and pick it up later.

Hard Disk?

Now I just need to fine a spare HDD. I was pretty sure there was a spare 2.5" laptop drive around here. Really sure. I don’t have many of those so they are easy to keep track of. Hummmm. Can’t find a spare. Ok, next option.

3.5" HDD. There are lots of these around here. Most from the early IDE days (I might need it!) and a few are SATA. This system only supports SATA. Looking, looking, looking … all IDE. Lots of 300G IDE drives …. finally, I find 2 SATA drives … a 1TB and a 300GB stacked in the pile.

Ok, so I’m weird. I have perfectly good HDDs stacked in a pile, unused. The 300GB will be fine – this box will be running XBMC anyways, so anything over 20GB is too much. I did look up what 2.5" small SATA drives cost – 160G was the smallest and it was about $40 when a 320G was only $70. The laptop drives don’t get as hot or use as much power. I don’t trust SSD drives yet.

I’m really happy now to have looked up the case website for the istar model S21-20F2 or I’d never have figured out how to mount the HDDs into the case cover.

After removing the HDD from the mounting bracket and turning it around, the HDD was finally happily mounted to the top case cover. I should have realized there was no way I could do it correctly the first time. ;)

Another advantage for all that searching is finding a small case fan and zip-ties to position the excessive cabling from the PSU out of the way and help with cooling of that HDD. Good thing I kept that tiny fan all these years.

We’ve all felt screwed before. Today, I’m listing the computer/tech items that I felt unsatisfied buying after a little use. These items really go beyond unsatisfied and enter into the completely screwed over or forever hate category.

I wanted to update my Acer Tablet, an A500, to ICS Android v4.x, but knew it would mean losing all my data, programs and root access. Today, the desire for MKV video support on the tablet finally overrode my desire to retain all that other stuff, and I started the update process.

This new article is about KVM and disk I/O performance based on this other article. It is for a smaller shop, not an enterprise with SAN storage.

I implemented one of the suggestions on my Windows7 Media Center virtual machine and saw about a 100% disk I/O throughput improvement even after already using virtio drivers. Going from 20MB/s to 40MB/s is pretty easy. Keep reading for the details.

I attended a local Ruby Meetup last week where they showed how to get all the dependencies for a smart RoR setup on Ubuntu. I’ve only tested it on 12.04 myself, but something similar should work for 10.04. I have doubts whether installing on 8.04 is this easy for the current versions of RVM, Ruby and Rails.

The installation instructions came from a gist from Cajun_Code. Following those instructions makes this process fairly straight forward. We’ll install RVM, Ruby v1.9.3, Rails, SQLite3, nginx and thin to get started.

Updated for Rails4 and Ruby 2.0.0 at the bottom of the article.