At the Linux Plumbers Conference Thursday, Arjan van de Ven, Linux developer at Intel and author of PowerTOP, and Auke Kok, another Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center, demonstrated a Linux system booting in five seconds. The hardware was an Asus EEE PC, which has solid-state storage, and the two developers beat the five second mark with two software loads: one modified Fedora and one modified Moblin. They had to hold up the EEE PC for the audience, since the time required to finish booting was less than the time needed for the projector to sync.

How did they do it? Arjan said it starts with the right attitude. «It's not about booting faster, it's about booting in 5 seconds.» Instead of saving a second here and there, set a time budget for the whole system, and make each step of the boot finish in its allotted time. And no cheating. «Done booting means CPU and disk idle,» Arjan said. No fair putting up the desktop while still starting services behind the scenes. (An audience member pointed out that Microsoft does this.) The «done booting» time did not include bringing up the network, but did include starting NetworkManager. A system with a conventional hard disk will have to take longer to start up: Arjan said he has run the same load on a ThinkPad and achieved a 10-second boot time.


( Read more )

If you are running your NSLU2 on a USB flash key, there are a number of
things you might want to do in order to reduce the wear and tear on the
underlying flash device (as it only supports a limited number of writes).

• The ext3 filesystem per default writes metadata changes every five
  seconds to disk. This can be increased by mounting the root filesystem
  with the commit=N parameter which tells the kernel to delay writes
  to every N seconds.


• The kernel writes a new atime for each file that has been read which
  generates one write for each read. This can be disabled by mounting the
  filesystem with the noatime option.


• Both of the above can be done by adding e.g.
  noatime,commit=120,... to /etc/fstab. This can also be
  done on an already mounted filesystem by running the command:
  

  mount -o remount,noatime,commit=120 /

  
  


• The system will run updatedb every day which creates a
  database of all files on the system for use with the locate
  command. This will also put some stress on the filesystem, so you might
  want to disable it by adding
  

  exit 0

  
  early in the /etc/cron.daily/find script.


• syslogd will in the default installation sync a lot of log files to
  disk directly after logging some new information. You might want to change
  /etc/syslog.conf so that every filename starts with a -
  (minus) which means that writes are not synced immediately (which increases
  the risk that some log messages are lost if your system crashes). For
  example, a line such as:
  

  kern.*                          /var/log/kern.log

  
  would be changed to:
  

  kern.*                          <span class="input">-</span>/var/log/kern.log

  
  You also might want to disable some classes of messages altogether by
  logging them to /dev/null instead, see syslog.conf(5) for
  details.


• In addition, syslogd likes to write — MARK -- lines to log
  files every 20 minutes to show that syslog is still running. This can be
  disabled by changing SYSLOGD in /etc/default/syslogd so
  that it reads
  

  SYSLOGD="-m 0"

  
  After you've made any changes, you need to restart syslogd by running
  

  /etc/init.d/syslogd restart

  
  


( Read more )

Have you ever done a thing repeatedly on your computer and wished that you could automate it and get it to run on its own?

In Linux, the easiest way to schedule and automate a task is to use the crontab. This is a command line based application that allows you to execute commands or scripts automatically at a specified time/date.

For those who dislike the terminal and command line interface, Gnome Schedule is the graphical equivalent of the crontab. It leverages the power of vixie-cron, dcron and at to manage your crontab file and provide an easy way to schedule tasks on your computer. Be it scheduling a recurrent task or task that happens only once, Gnome-schedule has no problem in handling it.



( Read more )

A few days back we looked at how to password protect your GRUB boot entries so that a password is required before anyone can boot the operating system or edit the boot entry.

Let’s look at some ways you can use to reset your Linux system’s password. You might know that the root user can change the password for any other user. However what if you forget your root password? This is what we would attempt to achieve here.

So, how to reset password in Linux?

( Read more )