Shocked, I tell you. I was shocked!

 Information Technology, Personal Life  No Responses »
Dec 162011
 

I was shocked when I arrived home last night to see system crash messages on a black console screen having just fsck’d another system following I/O errors after a power outage last night during which I discovered my UPS batteries have depleted. This, after having migrating from the safety net of RAID10 mirroring to the performance of RAID0 striping across my hard drives and installinging/customizing a whole new desktop environment (KDE -> Xfce), was not a pleasant sight. Fortunately, it was just a screensaver. ;-)

My Debian GNU/Linux desktop is now Xfce

 Information Technology, Personal Life  No Responses »
Dec 152011
 

I’ve tuned my Debian GNU/Linux desktop environment for Google+ and it is much more responsive. :-)

I had gotten in the habit of using several different browsers concurrently, each with its own cache of credentials and cookies, to avoid being tracked by Facebook and others as I surf the web  (see my previous post). However, I found my system was bogging down and quite sluggish, especially while using Chromium (Google’s open source variant of Chrome) to browse Google+.  So, over the past week, I embarked on a course of incremental performance enhancement:

  • disabled most G+ extensions & scripts in Chromium
  • implemented RAID0 striping on two SATA drives (previously setup as a mix of RAID10 and plain Linux partitions)
  • abandoned Chromium browser in favour of using Firefox for G+, with a  separate profile than for Facebook, etc.
  • abandoned most G+ Greasemonkey scripts in Firefox (notably the very nice Google+ Tweaks)
  • switched desktop environment from KDE to the lighter-weight Xfce

Happily, Xfce lets me use all my favourite KDE applications, plus those in Gnome. I’m already using it on my notebook so it’s not much of an adjustment for me. Kmail was the one major KDE program to which I had really grown attached but it is a real resource hog. Consequently, I took the opportunity to migrate to Claws, a nice multi-platform mail client program that I re-discovered when recently looking for a light-weight solution for my notebook. Now, I have a consistency across my platforms. ;-)