Somewhere out there!

I’ve been using nxat to redirect ALT-TAB when running the NX Client on Windows. However the latest 1.5 client broke nxat. Today another developer, Srini, has released nxutility which does work with the 1.5 client and is even better than nxat as it runs in the systray. Good job!

On Friday my NX desktop started playing up a little. So I rebooted. Kernel root VFS mount error! Very nice. After some testing, it was the first time I’d seen a faulty HDD bring down the Linux kernel even when booting from a Live CD rescue disk. Damn!

Luckily, I was using NFS home directories and avoided “where is that month old backup” mode.

Back in June I decided I’d try out NX and my MiniMac as a possible active working desktop solution. The genesis for this was mainly based on my decision back in March that iBooks were the best portable solution. Reasonable battery live, hardware/software combination that just works, together.

One of my goals with NX and Xen is to achieve Thin Guy‘s level of desktop support. Zero!

Sun Ray = Office Supplies. You can’t “Fix” a Sun Ray. Out of the 33,000 Sun Ray desktops inside of Sun, how many “desktop” techs do you think are required to manage that install base? How does the number zero grab you? On the ultra rare occasion that something happens to your Sun Ray (let’s say a power supply failure), you replace it and send it back for a warranty replacement (5 years on the SR1g). In the meantime you walk to the closet, grab a spare and plug it in and pick up exactly where you left off. Anyone who can replace staples in a stapler or replenish their supply of post-it notes can replace a Sun Ray

I was exploring some SunRay thinclient information when I happened on this interesting blog entry. Quiet racking systems for the home!! Very nice.

After read this blog, I’m wondering how well NX and the SunRay technology compare with each other.

MARC: msg ‘Re: [Xen-devel] BVT scheduler settings examples’:

xm bvt takes the following arguments:
DOM – domain id
MCUADV – inverse of weight. Therefore if you want to give more CPU decrease MCUADV

WARPBACK – boolean, enables domain to execute before other domains after waking up, decreases lattency, useful for driver domains
WARPVALUE – the bigger the value the greater number of domais will be preempted
WARPL – if warpback is enabled, limit the time that it is enabled for
WARPU – after warping was disabled by WARPL enable it again after WAPRU

So if you want 30/70 you can do the following:
xm bvt 1 47 0 0 0 0
xm bvt 2 20 0 0 0 0
(since 47/20 ~= 2.33 and 70/30=2.33) the MCUADV is integer, so in order to increase the granurality you can give bigger values. Only the relative value matters.

According to this comment, klik now works out of the box with breezy. Followups to this thread.

I haven’t updated to bleezy yet, but this gives me a good excuse when I find some time at the end of the week. Personally, I think it would be brillant if the OSX-like package management became a standard feature in Linux.