Somewhere out there!

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.

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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

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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.

An interesting set of stats pulled from: Mac Forums – Pentium M and Yonah Processors in Upcoming Macs?

With HT enabled, I can run two copies of the job, but they each take 3 CPU hours (and the two finish in 3 wall clock hours).

So, in a day, I can run 12 jobs without hyper-threading, or 16 jobs with hyper-threading. My Opterons do about 13 per day per CPU. (3.6 GHz/1MiB Xeon, 2.6GHz Opteron)

Is it slower with HT – by one measure, yes. Is it faster with HT – by a different measure, yes.

Mike Calligaro has posted a very interesting discussion about ROM/RAM battery usage in PDAs.

The requirement was that, at the point where we decided the batteries were “critically low,” they had to still have enough power to keep the RAM charged for 72 hours. The idea there was that you could discover that you were out of power on Friday on the way home and you’d still have your data on Monday when you got back to your charger.

A typical battery holds 1000mAh of charge. 128M of RAM takes about 500mAh to stay resident for 72 hours. 64M takes about 250. This is why you never saw a 256M WM 2003 device. It would have run for a minute then decided its batteries were critically low.

This is why switching to Persistent Storage can radically improve your battery life. With PS, we removed the 72 hour requirement.

I happened to have two IBM WinXP laptops on my desktop tonight as I was installing the NX client on one of these machine before my brother goes to China at the end of the week.

Anyway, I had a remote NX desktop running on his machine to my colo Xen machine about 256kbps (50ms) DSL away and on mine I had the local NX desktop which I’ve been using as a test install for the past two weeks. Compression was set at modem speeds for the remote and LAN speeds for the local desktops. I decided I need a test to show off NX off to him and figured a quick look at my gallery would be good. And it was. It surprised even myself.

The remote desktop loaded this page faster than the local desktop. There was a definitely noticeable difference in page display speed in Firefox. The quality of the remote desktop on the two screens was hardily different. The thumbnails on the remote were slightly blurry, but not by much.

The remote machine is sitting next (Xen-wise) to the gallery web server and obviously my local desktop load the thumbnails over the DSL link. So this is a certain testament to NX’s performance given that same page and images were rendered and presented faster from the remote location.

Detailed HOWTO on seting up Freenx on Fedora. Some comments about getting Gnome to work. I think Ubuntu has the same problem, but unfortunately doesn’t have the xkb config files mentioned. Will have to investigate further.

For a while I haven’t been able to get spellbound working. Today I got annoyed and discovered the following hint: Re: Firefox & Spellbound & Hoary – Solved.

The following worked for me:

* unzip spellbound\_lib\_linux_1.0.2.xpi
* cd bin/component/
* sudo cp \* /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/
* sudo mkdir /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/myspell
* unzip spell-en-NZ.xpi; rm install.js
* sudo cp * /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/myspell
* finally install spellbound as normal