Dare to Dream? » Ubuntu

How to commission developer machines in an agile way?

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 08:35:25 +0000

During the past year – working at AdoMado, I’ve seen myself & our developers wasting a lot of time in maintaining their own dev machines. Package install/upgrade/dependency failures, OS upgrade failures, hard drives failures, the machine not being available physically (in case of laptops), etc – are just a few cases.

Can there be a more agile way of working for developers? Given that the technology stack an organization runs on is often well defined, this should be fairly possible.

Very recently, I came across a project from one of the Slicehost founders Matt Tanase – BluePrint. The project lets you create versionable configurations from an existing installs. Just setup your machine the way you want it to be, run blueprint & wallah, you have a re-deployable configuration. Everything is created as a Git repository, hence any change you make to the configuration – is also versionable.

Next, if we can somehow automate the process of creating the machine images, we will be almost there. Luckily, there’s Vagrant. Its a tool to build & distribute virtualized environments. Blueprint also supports Vagrant.

Add to this, a web based editor (Bespin or Ace) – and you have a perfect recipe for dishing out pre-built images of your technology stack which are just perfect enough to be run on VirtualBox.

Imagine, its the first day of the developer. He can simply checkout such an image from a dashboard, run it on a VM & he’s ready to rock’n roll!

Since all of this is automated, this process can be improved & repeated as many times as one wants.

Sweet, aint it!

Ever since I started working on a Desktop as a full time machine, the only access to after-office-hours machine I have is my wife’s laptop – which being a WinBlows box, creeps me out. Such a setup, even if remotely possible – will give me the freedom I need to stretch my legs & utilize my free time

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Ubuntufying myself – the Karmic me!

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:28:58 +0000

Yep! I’m running Karmic Koala

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Ubuntu Karmic Koala Beta to be released later today

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:56:57 +0000

The much awaited Karmic Koala beta is due today from Ubuntu team…

With a ton of new features – and as always, the bleeding edge of the Linux world, I just can’t wait to test it out.

These features include

Gnome 2.28
Software Center (replacing the old Add/Remove)
Ubuntu One file sharing service
Kernel 2.6.31
Seemingly new video drivers for Intel based cards
Movement to ext4 and Grub2 as defaults
Uncomplicated Firewall
Newer KDE packages
And much more @ Technical Overview page

The Beta release is yet to happen – as the daily builds page is still reflecting the builds from 29th September.

GDM screen in Karmic Koala.
Sneak peak into more artwork at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Karmic/Backgrounds

Can’t wait!!

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Howto fix slow and choppy flash/video on ThinkPad T61 running Ubuntu Jaunty

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:06:30 +0000

Very recently, I upgraded from Ubuntu Intrepid to Ubuntu Jaunty – and to my horror, the system went very slow! I wasn’t sure what was causing the problem but Xorg reported near 100% CPU utilization in “top” output, Firefox felt very very heavy, flash videos on youtube were choppy and slow – even Gedit felt like a 200 megs java app – …that slow!

I googled a bit and realized that many were facing the same problem. Reason were the Intel video drivers in Jaunty.

This is how I fixed my Lenovo ThinkPad T61 running on Ubuntu Jaunty

Installed Kernel

Linux Warrior 2.6.28-15-generic #52-Ubuntu SMP Wed Sep 9 10:49:34 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

My T61′s Graphics Card

00:02.0 “VGA compatible controller” “Intel Corporation” “Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller” -r0c “Lenovo” “Device 20b5″

Step 1
Follow the guide at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4 and install xserver-xorg-video-intel-2.4 package/drivers. Restart GDM.
After installing these drivers, my system was back to sanity (firefox, gedit, etc) – however, flash videos were still choppy.

Step 2
Follow the changes mentioned at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/IntelPerformance and reboot.
This fixed the choppy flash issues for me.

Step 3
Thanks to the comment http://allredb.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/speed-up-flash-and-firefox-in-ubuntu-jaunty-904/#comment-2 – use the CPU Frequency scaling applet to make your CPU cores perform permanently at peak levels. Though this will cause higher battery consumption, I guess you are looking for better CPU speed (considering you are reading this post )

Thats it folks!
I hope this helps… my $0.02 – to make Ubuntu a better $home

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Speed up firefox, vacuum your firefox sqlite3 db

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:19:22 +0000

Firefox is agreeably slower than most other browsers (specially Google Chrome) – even on my Ubuntu.

Here is a great tip – after deploying which, I did felt the response time for cold startup and the UrlBar get better.

And here are the results…

for file in `ls *.sqlite`
do
ls -lh $file
sqlite3 $file vacuum
sqlite3 $file reindex
ls -lh $file
done

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 7.0K 2009-07-05 11:37 content-prefs.sqlite [BEFORE]
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 7.0K 2009-07-23 00:30 content-prefs.sqlite [AFTER]

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 553K 2009-07-23 00:25 cookies.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 376K 2009-07-23 00:30 cookies.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 97K 2009-07-23 00:15 downloads.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 4.0K 2009-07-23 00:30 downloads.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 257K 2009-07-23 00:20 formhistory.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 251K 2009-07-23 00:30 formhistory.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 2.0K 2009-07-11 13:51 permissions.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 2.0K 2009-07-23 00:30 permissions.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 18M 2009-07-23 00:26 places.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 12M 2009-07-23 00:30 places.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 2.0K 2009-06-05 21:09 search.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 2.0K 2009-07-23 00:30 search.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 11K 2008-11-04 22:02 signons.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 11K 2009-07-23 00:30 signons.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 3.0K 2009-05-31 02:03 sqlinjectionDB.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 3.0K 2009-07-23 00:30 sqlinjectionDB.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 303K 2009-07-09 23:41 ubiquity_ann.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 294K 2009-07-23 00:30 ubiquity_ann.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 2.0K 2009-07-05 11:39 ubiquity_skin_memory.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 2.0K 2009-07-23 00:30 ubiquity_skin_memory.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 2.0K 2009-07-11 10:36 ubiquity_suggestion_memory.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 2.0K 2009-07-23 00:30 ubiquity_suggestion_memory.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 287K 2008-11-23 21:09 urlclassifier2.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 142K 2009-07-23 00:30 urlclassifier2.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 19M 2009-07-23 00:28 urlclassifier3.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 19M 2009-07-23 00:30 urlclassifier3.sqlite

-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 2.0K 2009-06-13 00:10 webappsstore.sqlite
-rw-r–r– 1 makuchaku makuchaku 2.0K 2009-07-23 00:30 webappsstore.sqlite

I did not measure the cold startup time before and after the changes, but I can certainly see ff coming up more fast now. Fast enough – to make me sit and write this blog entry in the middle of coding a rails app.

More explanation about SQLite’s VACUUM and REINDEX operations.

Enjoy

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Running Ubuntu inside Win-XP

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:50:11 +0000

I’m nothing short of saying – “Holy cows”!!

Check this why…

If you noticed, thats Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron running on top of my Windows XP!!! Click on the image to see a bigger screenshot.

All thanks to Ubuntu Portable

So what does this means now?

I get to use apt-get and install a zillion other things for which I keep on requiring a shell access
I am no more dependent on Services For Unix
Use my mods to stay on top of the network
Have fun! Yay!!

The apps running inside Ubuntu Portable actually felt more faster than how they ran on my Windows box. I wonder, how Netbeans & Firefox (my major memory consumers) would work in such a setup… I am yet to configure the connectivity though…

This is some serious fun now!!! Trust me when I say that…

I’m darn sure, Sandy would love to see this! I just can’t wait to show this to him tonight

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