After several updates of various systems software packages on my Gentoo Linux servers, I began to notice a problem where I was being denied sudo access. The solution was amazingly simple, once I actually Googled to figure out what was going on.
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I seem to be surrounded by problems these days. Zend has announced that Zend Studio 7 is now in Beta, so I figured I’d go give it a try since I was having so many problems with Eclipse being sluggish and overall a piece of junk. Yes, I know Zend Studio 7 is based on Eclipse, but I can’t help but think that the slowness is a part of the PDT plugin I use for PHP development.
I’m running Gentoo Linux AMD64 on a dual-screen monitor utilizing Xinerama. I ran into a problem when trying to start the installer for Zend Studio.
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When Mozilla Firefox was still in Beta stages (e.g. pre-1.0), I fell in love with it. The browser was light-weight, standards-compliant, and much more secure than Internet Explorer. Ultimately, the thing that won me over was the fact that the browser had multiple tabs to allow me to browse multiple web sites without having to open a dozen different windows, yet still consumed very little memory.
Flash forward to today and we find that Firefox 3 is a bloated monster, especially on anyone’s computer that has more than 2GB of RAM. Why? Well, everything points to the caching that Firefox does behind the scene’s to make it have accellerated performance. However, after a certain point, this performance drops not just the browser, but the entire system. The caching algorithms by default use a percentage of total memory. Thus, the more memory you have, the greater initial percentage taken up by the caching system. So, on a system with 4GB of RAM (such as mine), I easily see Firefox consuming > 1GB of RAM - even with only 12 or so tabs open and things like Flash blocked.
I believe I have found a Firefox plugin that has managed to bring that memory bloating under control. The plugin is called RAMBack. So far on my Linux system, Firefox has gone from consuming ~25% of memory (~1GB) to just 4-6% (roughly between 175MB and 225MB). I’m going to try this plugin out on different platforms and see how it compares, and I encourage anyone else to do the same if they want to see immediate performance.
So, one of the things I’ve been working on is getting a nice Virtual Mail system setup for Cerberus’ Enterprise Hosting Solution. One of the things I’ve come to be really annoyed with is the lack of being able to apply procmail filtering to my mailbox (getting ~100+ e-mails from systems logs every day really makes my phone’s battery drain trying to download them all). After scrounging around, I managed to find a nice solution for my virtual mail hosting.
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I found an article today that any Gentoo (and likely any Linux user) should look at if they want fonts to look better than either Windows or Mac OS X. Check it out.
I had been in the market for a new music player, and Songbird wasn’t really cutting it for me. They didn’t have keyboard support built-in yet, and the application was bloated as hell (it took several hundred megs of memory - way more than a music player should). XMMS was out of the question because Gentoo removed it. So, I turned to a KDE app called Amarok. It was getting good reviews on sites I read, so I attempted to install it - and almost never made it past that point.
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