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The [Linux] Thread - Turn your three yard elf into a powerhouse!

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Posts

  • BarrakkethBarrakketh Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    I was using an old PC that I built with a 2.5GHz AthlonXP-M and a gig of RAM until the end of 2008. It couldn't handle H.264 video at 720p and encoding video took too long. I've since upgraded to a 2.6 GHz quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM.

    Compiling software takes much less time, same with video encoding. 1080p video is now watchable. Encoding multiple audio files at a time (I do this often) is also quicker since I updated the script I use for converting from lossless -> AAC (including tagging) to spawn a worker to encode one file per core simultaneously.

    Barrakketh on
    Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
  • MKRMKR Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Barrakketh wrote: »
    I was using an old PC that I built with a 2.5GHz AthlonXP-M and a gig of RAM until the end of 2008. It couldn't handle H.264 video at 720p and encoding video took too long. I've since upgraded to a 2.6 GHz quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM.

    Compiling software takes much less time, same with video encoding. 1080p video is now watchable. Encoding multiple audio files at a time (I do this often) is also quicker since I updated the script I use for converting from lossless -> AAC (including tagging) to spawn a worker to encode one file per core simultaneously.

    My laptop's 1.4Ghz Celeron M can just barely handle H.264 at 720p. :?

    MKR on
  • BarrakkethBarrakketh Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    MKR wrote: »
    Barrakketh wrote: »
    I was using an old PC that I built with a 2.5GHz AthlonXP-M and a gig of RAM until the end of 2008. It couldn't handle H.264 video at 720p and encoding video took too long. I've since upgraded to a 2.6 GHz quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM.

    Compiling software takes much less time, same with video encoding. 1080p video is now watchable. Encoding multiple audio files at a time (I do this often) is also quicker since I updated the script I use for converting from lossless -> AAC (including tagging) to spawn a worker to encode one file per core simultaneously.

    My laptop's 1.4Ghz Celeron M can handle H.264 at 720p. :?

    Try some more difficult material. For instance, Code Geass would play back fine but that plain black screen with the logo that bursts into particles would cause some serious slowdown. Then apply that to quite a few of the action scenes in Gundam 00 since the Gundam's used similar particles for propulsion :P Macross Frontier was another example that had some trouble during lots of action.

    Also, no hardware accelerated decoding for that machine.

    Barrakketh on
    Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
  • SeeksSeeks Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Just curious, how many of you guys have kids? I'm asking because I've got a niece who, in a year or less, I might be introducing to the wonderful world of computers. Do any of you folks have experience with "kid-friendly" software, edutainment, etc.? I have very fond memories of Reader Rabbit, and will definitely be trying to Wine/Dosbox that (or just install it on their Vista partition... whatever), but I haven't really kept up with the kid-friendly "scene".

    Any suggestions?

    Edit: I guess I should mention, I'm talking open-source stuff, or at least stuff that's fully ported to linux. If it's in the debian/ubuntu repos, I'm a happy guy. I'm not 100% against paying with dollars and cents, though.

    Edit again: Hmmm, according to Amazon, some Reader Rabbit stuff is available on linux. I wonder how legit that is.

    Seeks on
    userbar.jpg
    desura_Userbar.png
  • RhalloTonnyRhalloTonny Of the BrownlandsRegistered User regular
    edited March 2010
    For what it's worth, a long time ago I remember hearing about a program called TuxPaint that had some interesting features for kids.

    RhalloTonny on
    !
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    There's also bound to be some stuff in the Edubuntu meta-package.

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • iTunesIsEviliTunesIsEvil Cornfield? Cornfield.Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    So in Arch if I tell pacman that I want to install a package that's already installed and up-to-date it goes:
    warning: vim-7.2.368-3 is up to date -- reinstalling
    

    Now, that's not very cool because somehow vim is a 30MB package. Is there a way to tell pacman that if I say "install this" and "this" is already installed and up to date that it should not try to reinstall?

    iTunesIsEvil on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    But.. it asks you before it does it, right?
    sudo pacman -S vim
    warning: vim-7.2.368-3 is up to date -- reinstalling
    resolving dependencies...
    looking for inter-conflicts...
    
    Targets (1): vim-7.2.368-3  
    
    Total Download Size:    0,00 MB
    Total Installed Size:   28,91 MB
    
    Proceed with installation? [Y/n] 
    

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • iTunesIsEviliTunesIsEvil Cornfield? Cornfield.Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Visti wrote: »
    But.. it asks you before it does it, right?
    Yes, it does ask before doing it, but it's the question about installing everything I've requested. There's no special question specifically for the package that its about to reinstall. Not that I want one. More looking for a magical config setting somewhere that says:
    DontReinstallPackagesThatAreUpToDate yes
    

    :P

    iTunesIsEvil on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Flag --needed:
    Don’t reinstall the targets that are already up-to-date.

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • iTunesIsEviliTunesIsEvil Cornfield? Cornfield.Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Visti wrote: »
    Flag --needed:
    Don’t reinstall the targets that are already up-to-date.
    I... I missed that. Fuck.

    <3 Thank you Visti.

    iTunesIsEvil on
  • HounHoun Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Still a work in progress, but so far:

    Clean
    netbook_clean.png

    Terminals
    netbook_terms.png

    Video
    netbook_champloo.png

    Houn on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Not a fan of the entire bar being orange when a program is open. It loses its pop / contrast effect. Also The white on the orange kills my eyes. A dark brown there would be good. Or maybe something like #b1ac7c or something? Otherwise that's very nice. Could you post that conkyrc? And you need a matching dmenu. I like mine a lot. I can post my code for calling it on Alt+F2 from rc.lua.

    Itunes: Yeah, it wasn't in the man-page on my system, I had to pull up a different man-page on the web which had that.. I think it's time to put a alias yaourt = 'yaourt --needed' in my .bashrc.. I loads much quicker when it doesn't even check the file size when the program is the latest version.

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • HounHoun Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    I can do something like this:
    netbook_terms2.png

    It feels a bit less bold, though.

    conkyrc, shamelessly stolen and modified from someone on the Arch forums:
    own_window yes
    own_window_type override
    own_window_colour 303030
    own_window_transparent no
    #own_window_hints undecorated below sticky skip_taskbar skip_pager
    double_buffer yes
    cpu_avg_samples 10
    net_avg_samples 10
    use_xft no
    xftfont Profont:size=11
    update_interval 0.1
    minimum_size 1030 10
    maximum_width 1030
    border_inner_margin 1
    border_outer_margin 1
    border_width 0
    draw_outline no
    draw_shades no
    default_color white
    alignment bottom_middle
    use_spacer right
    no_buffers yes
    uppercase no
    gap_y 0
    short_units yes
    
    TEXT
    ${alignc}$nodename ${color #f28c23} | CPU:${color #f28c23} ${color white}${cpu}&#37;${color #f28c23} | /home: ${color lightgrey}${fs_used /home}/${fs_size /home}${color #f28c23} | RAM: ${color white}$mem ${color #f28c23}| Network:${color white} ${wireless_essid wlan0} ${downspeed wlan0} / ${color white}${upspeed wlan0} ${color #f28c23}| Battery: ${color white}${battery BAT0} ${battery_time BAT0} ${color #f28c23}| Volume:${color white} ${exec amixer get Master | egrep -o "[0-9]+%" | head -1 | egrep -o "[0-9]*"}%
    

    Houn on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    I was just thinking something like this because the white on orange is eyecrushing:
    contrast.png

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • HounHoun Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    I assume you have to hack dwm to make the bg on the focused app a different color than the bg on a focused tag. Which doesn't sound too hard, I'll look at the source later.

    Trying to keep the color scheme consistant with Cerberus from ME2, just for kicks.

    Houn on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Oh, yeah, probably. I assumed it was awesome.

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • HounHoun Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Nope, dwm has fully ensnared me. Helps that it's tiny, and I'm all about saving resources on this netbook.

    Houn on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    You ran Awesome before, though, right? What are the main differences?

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • HounHoun Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    I'm still running Awesome at work. The biggest differences is that Awesome is configured in Lua, while dwm is a tiny little bunch of C files, and you have to alter the code and recompile if you want to make any customizations. It's really not that hard to hack, though, and you end up with a super-tiny wm that boots incredibly fast, and uses nil for resources.

    Houn on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    I think maybe I won't see any speed increase over Awesome on the laptop I'm running, so I'm sticking by it. Boots instantly. I don't know why I cling to lightweight, it's a fairly beefy system by my standards.

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • HounHoun Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Because lightweight is pimpin'.

    Houn on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Truefax.

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • Joe ChemoJoe Chemo Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    I LIKE KDE GUYS.

    There I said it.

    Joe Chemo on
  • SeeksSeeks Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    I may have to give dwm another shot... at least, on my dad's shit laptop.

    It's just... last time I used it, I couldn't figure out how to do anything at all, and had to hard reboot. I'm scared.

    Seeks on
    userbar.jpg
    desura_Userbar.png
  • HounHoun Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Go edit config.h first, there's a decent list of keybindings. I set the mod key to Win right off.

    Houn on
  • Apothe0sisApothe0sis Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Using Debian, apache2.

    Any ideas why my per-user directories just straight up download as a blob rather than execute and display as inside the browser, but in /var/www/ it works fine.

    I'm using pretty much the default userdir.conf from /etc/apache2/mods-available copied to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled.

    It's annoyancing.

    EDIZT: Also, the DirectoryIndex directives are not working as one might wish. I do not care for this either.

    Apothe0sis on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Joe Chemo wrote: »
    I LIKE KDE GUYS.

    There I said it.

    I really like it too, but I just noticed that I barely use the framework, so I just boot straight awesome now. Still have all my KDE4 apps, but I don't use them very often.

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • templewulftemplewulf The Team Chump USARegistered User regular
    edited March 2010
    So, I don't think I've ever actually upgraded from one version to another in the same distro. I've found that you can upgrade to the latest version of ubuntu with upgrade-manager -d, but what if I just want to go to 9.04 or 9.10 instead of 10.04? Is there any way to do that without installing from a CD?

    templewulf on
    Twitch.tv/FiercePunchStudios | PSN | Steam | Discord | SFV CFN: templewulf
  • BarrakkethBarrakketh Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    templewulf wrote: »
    So, I don't think I've ever actually upgraded from one version to another in the same distro. I've found that you can upgrade to the latest version of ubuntu with upgrade-manager -d, but what if I just want to go to 9.04 or 9.10 instead of 10.04? Is there any way to do that without installing from a CD?

    I think you can only upgrade to the next release, not whatever the latest is. Update manager is more aware of what packages need special treatment for upgrades, but the release notes for Karmic says that you can only upgrade from Jaunty. If you actually wanted to go to 10.04 from 9.04 I think you'd have to go with apt-get dist-upgrade after manually editing your sources.list file and any entries in sources.list.d, which upgrade-manager normally handles itself.

    Barrakketh on
    Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
  • templewulftemplewulf The Team Chump USARegistered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Barrakketh wrote: »
    templewulf wrote: »
    So, I don't think I've ever actually upgraded from one version to another in the same distro. I've found that you can upgrade to the latest version of ubuntu with upgrade-manager -d, but what if I just want to go to 9.04 or 9.10 instead of 10.04? Is there any way to do that without installing from a CD?

    I think you can only upgrade to the next release, not whatever the latest is. Update manager is more aware of what packages need special treatment for upgrades, but the release notes for Karmic says that you can only upgrade from Jaunty. If you actually wanted to go to 10.04 from 9.04 I think you'd have to go with apt-get dist-upgrade after manually editing your sources.list file and any entries in sources.list.d, which upgrade-manager normally handles itself.

    Yeah, I read those notes, but my update-manager said 10.04. I decided to click on it to see if it would just go to an intermediate release, but it went straight to 10.04. A few things are broken, and I hate the new interface, so I'm just going to burn a 9.10 iso.

    templewulf on
    Twitch.tv/FiercePunchStudios | PSN | Steam | Discord | SFV CFN: templewulf
  • BarrakkethBarrakketh Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    templewulf wrote: »
    Barrakketh wrote: »
    templewulf wrote: »
    So, I don't think I've ever actually upgraded from one version to another in the same distro. I've found that you can upgrade to the latest version of ubuntu with upgrade-manager -d, but what if I just want to go to 9.04 or 9.10 instead of 10.04? Is there any way to do that without installing from a CD?

    I think you can only upgrade to the next release, not whatever the latest is. Update manager is more aware of what packages need special treatment for upgrades, but the release notes for Karmic says that you can only upgrade from Jaunty. If you actually wanted to go to 10.04 from 9.04 I think you'd have to go with apt-get dist-upgrade after manually editing your sources.list file and any entries in sources.list.d, which upgrade-manager normally handles itself.

    Yeah, I read those notes, but my update-manager said 10.04. I decided to click on it to see if it would just go to an intermediate release, but it went straight to 10.04. A few things are broken, and I hate the new interface, so I'm just going to burn a 9.10 iso.

    I've always resisted the urge to jump on the early upgrade bandwagon, and it's a good idea to read the release notes before upgrading. Let the early adopters deal with the bugs and wait for things to get ironed out :P

    Barrakketh on
    Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    So, I feel like doing something stupid. Any hot new distros around?

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • darkphoenix22darkphoenix22 Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Visti wrote: »
    Joe Chemo wrote: »
    I LIKE KDE GUYS.

    There I said it.

    I really like it too, but I just noticed that I barely use the framework, so I just boot straight awesome now. Still have all my KDE4 apps, but I don't use them very often.

    I am a huge fan of Xfce because of its configurablity and speed. Everything down to how your clock displays time is easily customizible (and 99.9% of time you don't have to edit a text file, though there is always that option). Most of all though, it is designed to be fast and to stay out of your way. There are no animations as there is no reason to hide slowness. Windows can simply pop-up instead of ssssllllliiiiddding into view.

    User interfaces should not just be pretty, they should be elegant and even graceful, which is a much harder thing to achieve.

    darkphoenix22 on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    I cannot stand XFCE and I've really tried to like it. I don't know what it is about it. It just feels odd to me. I've tried customizing it, but it will always have that XFCEness about it, that I really dislike. Not to mention that it would be heavier than the last couple of DEs I've had on my system.

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • SeeksSeeks Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    It was alright, only I recall it used to screw with Gnome, the way it kept config files and stuff.

    Granted, it's been a year or two since I've tried it.

    Seeks on
    userbar.jpg
    desura_Userbar.png
  • HounHoun Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Slightly updated my desktop. Already growing bored of the orange, though.

    Clean:
    netbook_clean3.png

    Terms:
    netbook_terms3.png

    Houn on
  • VistiVisti Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Really nice. I rethink my low-contrast setup everytime I see something that uses a nice colorscheme like that, but I just love mine so much.

    Visti on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • FodderFodder Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Nice choice on the hostname btw, my netbook is icarus and my laptop is daedalus.

    Fodder on
    steam_sig.png
  • HounHoun Registered User regular
    edited March 2010
    Fodder wrote: »
    Nice choice on the hostname btw, my netbook is icarus and my laptop is daedalus.

    Ha ha, same. And my server, when it was running, was Helios. Greek Mythology/Deus Ex for the win.

    Houn on
This discussion has been closed.