Somewhere along the line, there was a review up of Mandriva 2006 where the reviewer mentioned extremely slow performance in KDE, but on loading GNome instead, things were just fine. I’ve seen some slow KDE performance on the laptop that I upgraded and thought I’d pass along some of what I’ve done to help the situation. For starters, it’s probably a good time to review the main system services (yes I know it seems to be just KDE, but it never hurts to ask “do I really need to leave the webserver running all the time?”)
Tag: time
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MySQL moving for backup plan after Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB
InnoDB (and MyISAM) has been the backend MySQL engine up until now, but Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB could threaten that. MySQL has wasted little time in search for replacement options. InnoDB is open source, but there is the threat that Oracle could work a change in the license and make it an “unattractive choice” for MySQL to use as a backend engine. The purchase itself doesn’t automatically disqualify InnoDB, but what Oracle decides to do with it may.
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Microsoft’s unpatched security bugs
George Ou at ZDnet is mystified (as many of us are) at why Microsoft can’t patch ALL their security vulnerabilities. Most of the unpatched vulnerabilities are considered minor (as was the 6 month old bug that in the last week was discovered could be exploited for more than a Denial of Service…) His point is, if small companies (even open source groups) can patch ALL security bugs big and small, then why can’t Microsoft with it’s legions of coders?
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200GB of optical storage anyone?
For those of you feeling somewhat cramped by the 4.5-9GB capacity of current single/dual layer dvds…. The inquirer has a story on what is coming…. Ricoh believes that by 2008 they can produce a 200GB optical drive that will be compatible with the Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats. The discs would have 8 layers (compared to Blu-ray/HD’s 2 layers).
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Mozilla Firefox 1.5 to be released November 29th
Word has it that Mozilla Firefox 1.5 will be released Tuesday, November 29th, 2005. It’s gone through three release candidates and a number of betas. I think there are some good improvements from what I’ve seen of the 1.5 release candidates. One of the features I like is the auto-update feature allowing updates from within the browser to automatically happen. (Also, the updates can be done on a smaller scale than the old “download the whole thing and reinstall the whole application.”)
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Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part II
Well the saga continues. I suspect there will be a three as I get all software installed and mention tips and tweaks. III may not be named as such, I may just do a series of articles on little things that I’ve changed. At this hour I’ve got the KDE desktop for Mandriva 2006 up and running and am as I type letting more software install. I’ve had a few bumps along the way and let me tell you about them. First was the bad md5sum on the first disk image… my fault. I expected bittorrent to have checked it and made sure it was correct, but apparently that failed. Again, my fault.
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XBox 360 launch and problems
I’ve not been big into console games. The last computer we had that directly connected to the TV all the time was an old Atari 400. (Which I occassionaly wax nostalgic for…) Anyway, the XBox 360 is the recently released big new upgrade to the XBox from Microsoft and there are a couple of interesting reports out about it today. For one, Business Week is reporting on the likely loss that Microsoft is taking on each unit (they seel for $399), they’ve looked and think that MS is losing a bit over $100 on each one. The goal of course, is to make money off the games. There is worse news though for some XBox 360 new owners.
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Old Play by mail (email) games…
Ok – not work related, but… I was remembering with one of my brother’s a computer game we played maybe 10 years ago that was a strategy game and had a neat play by email feature. The game was turn based, we’d make a move and it had a handy link to email the game info to each other and I think we went back and forth with it for several weeks. It was really quite an entertaining way to deal with the game. Now, today, with realtime strategy games, online multiplayer communities, etc. play by email seems a bit dated, but for many turn based games this would be one feature I’d LOVE to see more of.
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New Sober variants..
Ok – there are some new variants on the Sober worm circulating. I received one on an address that’s unfiltered (no virus/spam filtering) and must say, I can see people being duped into looking at the attachment. Sans has a post on it.. Sarc is calling it W32sober.x@mm and rates it at a threat level of three. I’ve seen many outlets tag it as sober.y
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Mandriva 2006 review
Madpengiun now has a review up of Mandriva 2006. I’m still hoping soon to have time to sit down and upgrade on at least the laptop. The biggest problem the reviewer had was (slow?) performance under KDE which he suspected could be hardware specific. Overall it sounds like things are VERY well done, it looks like a nice interactive firewall, a la zonealarm is in there which the reviewer was pleased with.