[gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a horror story about some brand. Thanks much. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
[gentoo-user] Read your cups-1.5 elog!
Just thought I'd remind everyone to read their cups-1.5 elog when upgrading from 1.4. It's necessary to either disable the usb USE flag or disable USB Printer support in the kernel in order for USB printers to work after the upgrade. I just figured that out this morning after working on the problem for hours last night. - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, 09 May 2012 03:47:09 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a horror story about some brand. Green drives are basically just low power drives. It's a branding gimmick. Like you noticed already, they tend to spin slower (uses less power). I stuck 4 of them in my media server for 12TB of cheap storage. And they are silent. I can barely hear them running even when I'm sitting next to the server and the kids are running the telly full tilt :-) I haven't heard any mention from anyone at all that they are less reliable in any way. I'd expect them to be more reliable than super-fast drives because they are lower power, but drive models have so many things affecting reliability it's hard to tell. One thing we have noticed is that Samsung's recent model are not very green, they spin up slowly, use lots of power and make a racket when spinning. But they do work. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Alan McKinnon wrote: On Wed, 09 May 2012 03:47:09 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a horror story about some brand. Green drives are basically just low power drives. It's a branding gimmick. Like you noticed already, they tend to spin slower (uses less power). I stuck 4 of them in my media server for 12TB of cheap storage. And they are silent. I can barely hear them running even when I'm sitting next to the server and the kids are running the telly full tilt :-) I haven't heard any mention from anyone at all that they are less reliable in any way. I'd expect them to be more reliable than super-fast drives because they are lower power, but drive models have so many things affecting reliability it's hard to tell. One thing we have noticed is that Samsung's recent model are not very green, they spin up slowly, use lots of power and make a racket when spinning. But they do work. I was thinking the same thing about the speed and them lasting longer because of the slower speed. I mean, it's less wear and less heat. I'd just hate to buy one and it be a piece of junk or something else I wasn't expecting to be wrong. I wish I could afford server grade. Wee!! I'm going to give this a shot. It's not like the OS is on it and I will be putting a lot of wear on it or be making those heads sing. It's just going to store videos, music and other stuff. I plan to set it up with LVM and put /home on it. Then I'm going to get rid of this legacy /data directory I have been carrying around for the past 7 or 8 years. Just put it all in /home where it should have been to begin with. I also forgot to mention, this rig runs 24/7 for the most part. It's usually only off when the power has failed and my UPS is a bit low. I'll be glad when they get our new wires ran for power. They been working on it for at least a month. It's ONLY 12 miles or so. ;-) They are replacing poles, wires, hardware and everything. I been here for 40 years, I have never seen them replace all this. Bad thing is, the lights go out when they do a major switch over. I bet the lines won't be breaking so much when this is done, at least not until some nut wrecks and hits the stinking pole. :/ Thanks for the info. At least I know it won't be junk. lol Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] ssh stalls - please help
On Tue, 8 May 2012 09:09:28 +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote: The problem is caused by the server running openssh-0.6_p1 with the hpn USE flag, which is enabled by default. Either downgrade to 5.x or re-emerge with USE=-hpn. I did the latter and everything is working as it should now. The bug report at https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=414401 now contains another solution. Leave hpn enabled but set TcpRcvBufPoll to no in sshd_config. I've tried this and it seems to work. Now we just need to find which kernel option to set to get this to work properly. -- Neil Bothwick I know corn oil comes from corn, where does baby oil come from? signature.asc Description: PGP signature
[gentoo-user] why is it using OpenDNS?
One of my systems is using OpenDNS: # cat /etc/resolv.conf nameserver 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220 # cat /etc/conf.d/net config_wlan0=192.168.0.2 broadcast 192.168.0.255 netmask 255.255.255.0 routes_wlan0=default via 192.168.0.1 and I can't figure out why. Does anyone know why this is happening? 192.168.0.1 has the ISP in resolv.conf. - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] why is it using OpenDNS?
Try appending this into your /etc/conf.d/net dns_servers_wlan0=208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220 with or without quotes and brackets I am not really sure. dns_servers_wlan0=( 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220 ) Hope this helps! On 05/09/12 03:36, Grant wrote: One of my systems is using OpenDNS: # cat /etc/resolv.conf nameserver 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220 # cat /etc/conf.d/net config_wlan0=192.168.0.2 broadcast 192.168.0.255 netmask 255.255.255.0 routes_wlan0=default via 192.168.0.1 and I can't figure out why. Does anyone know why this is happening? 192.168.0.1 has the ISP in resolv.conf. - Grant -- Willie Matthews matthews.wil...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] ssh stalls - please help
On 05/09/2012 11:56:45 AM, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Tue, 8 May 2012 09:09:28 +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote: The problem is caused by the server running openssh-0.6_p1 with the hpn USE flag, which is enabled by default. Either downgrade to 5.x or re-emerge with USE=-hpn. I did the latter and everything is working as it should now. The bug report at https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=414401 now contains another solution. Leave hpn enabled but set TcpRcvBufPoll to no in sshd_config. I've tried this and it seems to work. Now we just need to find which kernel option to set to get this to work properly. Sorry, but I don't this. You say, it works without changing any kernel configuration. So, why Now we just need to find which kernel option to set to get this to work properly. Helmut.
[gentoo-user] mplayer2 idle CPU condumption
Hi there! When you pause mplayer2 playing any kind of video, does its process also use 100% of one of your cores? I think this is weird. I'm switching back to mplayer. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
I'm using big WD Caviar Green (WDxxEAxx) SATA HDDs for some years now in my home 24/7 server, and haven't had any issues - they run cool and low-noise, and the performance is good. Low power and heat was what was important for me when choosing. HDD performance isn't an issue anyway, when storing media files over a home network :)
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On 2012-05-09 4:47 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? As long as you don't use them in any kind of RAID setup you they should be fine. The biggest difference between them and 'enterprise' class drives is the enterprise class drives are designed for multi-drive RAID setups... you don't want drives to spin down independently when working in a RAID setup...
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Daniel Troeder wrote: I'm using big WD Caviar Green (WDxxEAxx) SATA HDDs for some years now in my home 24/7 server, and haven't had any issues - they run cool and low-noise, and the performance is good. Low power and heat was what was important for me when choosing. HDD performance isn't an issue anyway, when storing media files over a home network :) Sounds like these drives are going to be OK then. My concern was that they would be made cheaper and not be as reliable but it seems folks are happy with them which is good. I like WD drives. The one drive I have had fail was a WD. I have a few of them so maybe it is just a bad apple or is it a lemon? Anyway. I'm getting quite a collection of videos and stuff. I'm thinking 2Tb or 3Tb. The 3Tb is more expensive but it will take longer to fill it up. Decisions. Decisions. Maybe newegg will have a BIG sale soon. While on the thread. Has anyone had any sort of luck with the recertified drives? I see them sometimes and wonder what the deal is. Are they repaired drives or just returned drives? Anyone have any experience, good or bad, with those? Thanks for the replies. Sounds good so far. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On 05/09/2012 07:47 AM, Tanstaafl wrote: As long as you don't use them in any kind of RAID setup you they should be fine. The biggest difference between them and 'enterprise' class drives is the enterprise class drives are designed for multi-drive RAID setups... you don't want drives to spin down independently when working in a RAID setup... AFAIK, the only technical difference between a consumer drive and an enterprise one is that the enterprise one doesn't tell lies. Or at least, it isn't supposed to. Consumer drives will acknowledge writes before they have hit the platter, even if the cache is disabled on the drive (and some consumer drives do not even allow the cache to be disabled). The only scenario this seriously guards against is unexpected power loss, where the drive has told the OS that the data has been written to disk, but it is somewhere in-between (e.g., on cache, but not on the platter) and then the power is disconnected from the unit (specifically, the drive itself). Even an unexpected reboot from the computer won't affect this, unless the computer removes power to the device during early boot (and on x86 systems, that is a virtual impossibility). --- Mike -- A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense. --- Carveth Read, “Logic” signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
[gentoo-user] Re: mplayer2 idle CPU condumption
On 09/05/12 14:31, Alex Schuster wrote: When you pause mplayer2 playing any kind of video, does its process also use 100% of one of your cores? Nope.
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 4:47 AM, Tanstaafl tansta...@libertytrek.org wrote: On 2012-05-09 4:47 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? As long as you don't use them in any kind of RAID setup you they should be fine. The biggest difference between them and 'enterprise' class drives is the enterprise class drives are designed for multi-drive RAID setups... you don't want drives to spin down independently when working in a RAID setup... +1 I use the WD 1TB Green drive for storing video outside my machine using both USB eSATA. Works fine. Very quite, cool. Way faster than necessary for streaming movies. Nice. As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years. HTH, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Am Mittwoch, 9. Mai 2012, 03:47:09 schrieb Dale: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a horror story about some brand. Thanks much. Dale :-) :-) samsung here. Put that beast into an esata case. Sometimes I forget to turn it off, because it is so silent. And cool. The others should be similar. They are slower, yes, but fast enough to watch video. 7200 for stuff that needs some speed. 5400 for video and backups. just fine. -- #163933
Re: [gentoo-user] Read your cups-1.5 elog!
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Grant emailgr...@gmail.com wrote: Just thought I'd remind everyone to read their cups-1.5 elog when upgrading from 1.4. It's necessary to either disable the usb USE flag or disable USB Printer support in the kernel in order for USB printers to work after the upgrade. I just figured that out this morning after working on the problem for hours last night. - Grant If you've been on this list for a while, then you'd know that this issue has been discussed here twice. Though good that you reminded. -- Nilesh Govindarajan http://nileshgr.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: mplayer2 idle CPU condumption
Nikos Chantziaras writes: On 09/05/12 14:31, Alex Schuster wrote: When you pause mplayer2 playing any kind of video, does its process also use 100% of one of your cores? Nope. Thanks. Another thing that happens to me only. I filed a bug about this: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=415241 Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On 2012-05-09 8:06 AM, m...@trausch.us m...@trausch.us wrote: AFAIK, the only technical difference between a consumer drive and an enterprise one is that the enterprise one doesn't tell lies. Or at least, it isn't supposed to. There's a bit more to it than that... http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/enterprise_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_.pdf
Re: [gentoo-user] ssh stalls - please help
On Wed, 09 May 2012 13:29:26 +0200, Helmut Jarausch wrote: The bug report at https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=414401 now contains another solution. Leave hpn enabled but set TcpRcvBufPoll to no in sshd_config. I've tried this and it seems to work. Now we just need to find which kernel option to set to get this to work properly. Sorry, but I don't this. You say, it works without changing any kernel configuration. So, why Now we just need to find which kernel option to set to get this to work properly. The comment for that configuration option states # tcp receive buffer polling. disable in non autotuning kernels. Setting it to no makes it work, but the implication is that there is a kernel option that will work with the default. -- Neil Bothwick RAM DISK is NOT an installation procedure! signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On May 9, 2012 7:36 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years. I can understand how 'green' drives can fcuk up hardware RAID arrays. But what about software RAID, e.g., dmraid? Can't we just configure it to be 'more forgiving'? Rgds,
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Pandu Poluan pa...@poluan.info wrote: On May 9, 2012 7:36 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: As for RAID, +100 to not use them. The WD Green drives do not support time-limited error recovery (TLER) and spin down based on their view of trying to save power. For me anyway they simply didn't work well in any RAID configuration. I switched my home compute server to Enterprise drives which have worked perfectly for 2+ years. I can understand how 'green' drives can fcuk up hardware RAID arrays. But what about software RAID, e.g., dmraid? Can't we just configure it to be 'more forgiving'? Rgds, Possibly. Someone with more experience with mdadm probably could do a better job but I'd never done RAID of any type at that time (I'm just a home user who taught myself whatever little I know about Linux through this list) and built this server with 5 drives to run a number of Windows VMs so I was pretty sure I wanted RAID. I bought the WD Green 1TB drives a little over 2 years ago and had multiple problems. First problem was the 4K sector size issue which was fairly new at that time, and then once I got past that I tried RAID and it still didn't work well at all. The best answer at the time was some piece of low level software from WD called something like wdtwiddle or something silly as I remember it but I decided to cut my storage in half and replaced the 1TB Green drives with 500GB Enterprise drives. Since then I've heard of people using Green drives for RAID and doing fine but it didn't work with the ones I purchased. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: The best answer at the time was some piece of low level software from WD called something like wdtwiddle or something WDTLER :)
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: The best answer at the time was some piece of low level software from WD called something like wdtwiddle or something WDTLER :) Hey, I wasn't that far off! ;-)
[gentoo-user] Missing perl File-FcntlLock / debhelper (dh_gencontrol) fails
Hello, after some time I have to rebuild some debian packages using the debhelper scripts and recognized the following error: 'dh_gencontrol' fails with missing File/FcntlLock.pm: $ dpkg-buildpackage -b -d ... dh_gencontrol Can't locate File/FcntlLock.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.12.4/x86_64-linux /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.12.4 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/5.12.4/x86_64- linux /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/5.12.4 /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5/5.12.4/x86_64-linux /usr/lib64/perl5/5.12.4 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at /usr/bin/dpkg- gencontrol line 24. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/bin/dpkg-gencontrol line 24. dh_gencontrol: dpkg-gencontrol -ldebian/changelog -Tdebian/modules-xen- domu.substvars -Pdebian/modules-xen-domu returned exit code 2 make: *** [binary-arch] Error 25 dpkg-buildpackage: error: fakeroot debian/rules binary gave error exit status 2 There were no changes done within the debian rules or similar, just the packages sources have been updated - these rules worked fine in the past. I can also confirm that everything workes fine again after manually installing the CPAN 'File-FcntlLock' package from http://search.cpan.org/~jtt/File-FcntlLock-0.12/ I don't understand why the File-FcntlLock package is not provided by portage (at least I didn't find any corresponding package) - it looks like it has been removed from portage tree (as the problem did not occur in the past - even though I could not find any entry regarding an uninstall in emerge.log either). I tried to solve the problem by running - emerge -vu --deep --newuse @world - revdep-rebuild - emerge --oneshot dev-lang/perl - perl-cleaner --all - perl-cleaner --allmodules --libperl --phupdate There's still no File/FcntlLock.pm. Which portage package or missing USE flag should provide this CPAN package? Is it obsolete and should be replaced by something else? Then it would be a bug in debhelpers dependencies ... dev-lang/perl dev-util/debhelper are both current stable versions, installing latest unstable dev-util/debhelper makes no difference. Thanks a lot best regards Hans
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
I wrote: Mark Knecht writes: OK, fire up two terminals. In one run top, hit 1 z so you see all your CPUs and then watch CPU usage. In the second terminal su to root and run iotop -o. Now, watch for a few minutes and get a feel for what's going on when video is not running. Then start your video and watch IO usage and CPU usage. Where's the problem? Once you get an idea where the bottleneck is we can address what a solution might be. In general, if the CPUs aren't maxed out and it's an I/O problem then usually a bit more buffering is a simple solution. Other more draconian solution might be a real-time kernel with a player (if there is one) that is set up for real-time playback. Looking forward to hearing your test results. Thanks for your support, Mark! I did this already, but sometimes I do not notice anything. I guess it's short I/O operations in that case. CPU load is not the problem, and it happens for both high-quality videos and small ones. Currently iotop shows stuff like kjournald, kworker, kdeinit4, akonadiserver, firefox. And lots of virtuoso-t and nepomuk when I enable indexing again, which I just suspended. And mplayer of course, it shows up in about every 2nd redisplay, which happens every second. Well... but when I do the same in the other window manager, it seems I see fewer processes then. Are they mostly suspended when I am on another display? I watched for longer now, and this does not seem to be true. And I should fire up the same stuff (Firefox, Chromium, maybe KDEPIM stuff) in the other WM and see if this makes things worse. But I'll do this tomorrow. Thanks for the inspiration, though, at least I have something more to try now. I am running Enlightenment 0.16 in parallel now, with Firefox, Chromium, Kontact, Claws, Liferea, Amarok (which is doing a lot of I/OP stuff at the moment according to iotop), and Dolphin showing a large directory of multimedia files wit thumbnails. But I don't see akonadi related processes in iotop, that is unusual. I did the dd command to create more I/O. No gaps in video display at all. When I play the video from within KDE (running Konsoles, Konqueror, Dolphin and a lot of plasma stuff), I have gaps, and when I do the dd command, there are in the range of seconds. Even for some seconds after I canceled the dd. I also tried a fresh, unconfigured KDE session by another user. I've already done that, and there were also gaps in video playback, although it seems they were fewer. But this time, I was not able to reproduce them. Huh? I guess I could remove anything running on my KDE desktop one by one, including plasmoids, and see if playback gets better. But not now, I finally have to actually do some work. Wonko
[gentoo-user] quick question on ALSA_CARDS
My SB Live! 5.1 sang its last note finally, so I'm reverting to the onboard Intel chip. I got my kernel configured already, but when I went to edit make.conf, I became confused on which of the following is correct: ALSA_CARDS=snd-hda-intel or ALSA_CARDS=hda-intel I googled it and, of course, found examples for both :-/ I then used 'eix/' to check the alsa packages and didn't see either form. Which is correct? On a side note, is it even needed since I run a monolithic kernel? -- Douglas J Hunley (doug.hun...@gmail.com) Twitter: @hunleyd Web: douglasjhunley.com G+: http://goo.gl/sajR3
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
On Wed, 9 May 2012 21:44:19 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote: I guess I could remove anything running on my KDE desktop one by one, including plasmoids, and see if playback gets better. But not now, I finally have to actually do some work. I recently experienced slowdowns and delays with KDE. It turned out I had inadvertently disabled swap (I'd rearranged my partitions and not updated fstab). As soon as I gave it some swap space the delays disappeared. -- Neil Bothwick Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
[gentoo-user] Re: quick question on ALSA_CARDS
On 09/05/12 23:10, Doug Hunley wrote: My SB Live! 5.1 sang its last note finally, so I'm reverting to the onboard Intel chip. I got my kernel configured already, but when I went to edit make.conf, I became confused on which of the following is correct: ALSA_CARDS=snd-hda-intel or ALSA_CARDS=hda-intel I googled it and, of course, found examples for both :-/ I then used 'eix/' to check the alsa packages and didn't see either form. Which is correct? On a side note, is it even needed since I run a monolithic kernel? It's not needed. It's also not needed when building sound drivers as modules. AFAIK, ALSA_CARDS serves no purpose anymore, since it was used to control the drivers that were built by the alsa-driver ebuild. The alsa-driver package has been removed from portage. You can simply delete ALSA_CARDS from make.conf.
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, 09 May 2012 04:52:57 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I was thinking the same thing about the speed and them lasting longer because of the slower speed. I mean, it's less wear and less heat. I'd just hate to buy one and it be a piece of junk or something else I wasn't expecting to be wrong. I wish I could afford server grade. Wee!! My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. For video, I would advise you invest in gobs and gobs of RAM (the stuff is dirt cheap these days). Have more RAM than the biggest video you will watch (so go for 8G minimum) and the entire video will fit in memory = read the disc once and watch. Funny lags in video just go away. That's what I did with my HP MicroServers - maxed out the RAM to 8G and bought 4 x 3T WD 5400 drives. It runs FreeNAS (built on FreeBSD) with ZFS = shove the drives in and let them software figure out what the blazes to do. Over the years I've gotten sick and tired of pampering with disk arrays and treating them like fragile china that must be molly-coddled. What I want is lots of storage that will mail me when it detects issues. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Missing perl File-FcntlLock / debhelper (dh_gencontrol) fails
On 9 May 2012, at 19:59, Hans Müller wrote: ... after some time I have to rebuild some debian packages using the debhelper scripts and recognized the following error: 'dh_gencontrol' fails with missing File/FcntlLock.pm: $ dpkg-buildpackage -b -d ... dh_gencontrol Can't locate File/FcntlLock.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl ... I don't understand why the File-FcntlLock package is not provided by portage (at least I didn't find any corresponding package) - it looks like it has been removed from portage tree (as the problem did not occur in the past - even though I could not find any entry regarding an uninstall in emerge.log either). Have you upgraded dev-util/debhelper recently? Since you last used `dh_gencontrol`, at least? I'll bet this is a new dependency of the debhelper scripts, not something else removed from Portage. File a bug. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Alan McKinnon wrote: On Wed, 09 May 2012 04:52:57 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I was thinking the same thing about the speed and them lasting longer because of the slower speed. I mean, it's less wear and less heat. I'd just hate to buy one and it be a piece of junk or something else I wasn't expecting to be wrong. I wish I could afford server grade. Wee!! My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. That's my thoughts too. It doesn't matter what brand you go with, they all have some sort of failure at some point. They are not built to last forever and there is always the random failure, even when a week old. It's usually the loss of important data and not having a backup that makes it so bad. I'm not real picky on brand as long as it is a company I have heard of. Now if someone posts that there is a bad design for some set of drives, I would avoid that. If there are people that have a unusual high failure rate then maybe an exception to the rule is needed. That's rare tho. Anyone want to buy a Yugo for full price? lol I wouldn't. For video, I would advise you invest in gobs and gobs of RAM (the stuff is dirt cheap these days). Have more RAM than the biggest video you will watch (so go for 8G minimum) and the entire video will fit in memory = read the disc once and watch. Funny lags in video just go away. That's what I did with my HP MicroServers - maxed out the RAM to 8G and bought 4 x 3T WD 5400 drives. It runs FreeNAS (built on FreeBSD) with ZFS = shove the drives in and let them software figure out what the blazes to do. Over the years I've gotten sick and tired of pampering with disk arrays and treating them like fragile china that must be molly-coddled. What I want is lots of storage that will mail me when it detects issues. I got that beat a long time ago. I started out with 4Gbs originally. I found out that a 64 bit OS uses a bit more memory so, I got another 4Gbs. Then newegg had a sale on a pair of 4gb sticks and I got them. I'm at 16Gbs right now. I need to ramp up drive space to match up with my memory space. I'm maxed out on ram but I got SATA ports that are empty. We can't have that can we? lol Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am Mittwoch, 9. Mai 2012, 03:47:09 schrieb Dale: Hi, As some know, I'm planning to buy me a LARGE hard drive to put all my videos on, eventually. The prices are coming down now. I keep seeing these green drives that are made by just about every company nowadays. When comparing them to a non green drive, do they hold up as good? Are they as dependable as a plain drive? I guess they are more efficient and I get that but do they break quicker, more often or no difference? I have noticed that they tend to spin slower and are cheaper. That much I have figured out. Other than that, I can't see any other difference. Data speeds seem to be about the same. Please, no brand wars. I may get a WD, Maxtor, Samsung or some other brand. I haven't picked that part yet. So far, I have had good luck with drives. I think I have one doorstop so far. I have at least one of each of the brands above too. Don't jinx me. I'm sure someone has a horror story about some brand. Thanks much. Dale :-) :-) samsung here. Put that beast into an esata case. Sometimes I forget to turn it off, because it is so silent. And cool. The others should be similar. They are slower, yes, but fast enough to watch video. 7200 for stuff that needs some speed. 5400 for video and backups. just fine. My videos and such is on a Samsung 750Gb drive now. I'm pretty sure it is a 7200rpm drive tho. My whole system is quiet. I have a Cooler Master HAF-932 case with those LARGE fans and you can't hear anything. Even if I cut everything else off in this room, I can't hear the system at all. Let's keep in mind that I am getting older tho. ;-) One reason I am considering the green drives is that I can buy a larger drive for about the same price. I use LVM so I added a 250Gb drive to the 750Gb to get 1Tb. Thing is, I'll have that full to before to long. I need to go ahead and get a large drive. Even a 2Tb drive will be about half full if I transfer it all over. Of course I'm keeping the 750Gb to tho. Here is where I am with all drives in use. /dev/mapper/data-data1 923G 619G 297G 68% /data I start looking when I get to about 70% and by 85%, I want some hardware or a plan to move things around or something. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: It doesn't matter what brand you go with Especially true since there are only 2 companies actually making consumer hard drives anymore: WD and Seagate. Both of them seem to know what they are doing, for the most part... Some hard drives fail at the beginning of their life. All hard drives fail at the end of their life. :)
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: SNIP My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. That's my thoughts too. It doesn't matter what brand you go with, they all have some sort of failure at some point. They are not built to last forever and there is always the random failure, even when a week old. It's usually the loss of important data and not having a backup that makes it so bad. I'm not real picky on brand as long as it is a company I have heard of. One thing to keep in mind is statistics. For a single drive by itself it hardly matters anymore what you buy. You cannot predict the failure. However if you buy multiple identical drives at the same time then most likely you will either get all good drives or (possibly) a bunch of drives that suffer from similar defects and all start failing at the same point in their life cycle. For RAID arrays it's measurably best to buy drives that come from different manufacturing lots, better from different factories, and maybe even from different companies. Then, if a drive fails, assuming the failure is really the fault of the drive and not some local issue like power sources or ESD events, etc., it's less likely other drives in the box will fail at the same time. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Paul Hartman wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: It doesn't matter what brand you go with Especially true since there are only 2 companies actually making consumer hard drives anymore: WD and Seagate. Both of them seem to know what they are doing, for the most part... Some hard drives fail at the beginning of their life. All hard drives fail at the end of their life. :) I'm about to show my age so please close your eyes. Pretty please. -_- Way back in the stone age, there was a guy that released a curve for electronics life. The failure rate is high at the beginning, especially for the first few minutes, then falls to about nothing, then after several years it goes back up again. At the beginning of the curve, the thought was it could be a bad solder job, bad components or some other problem. At the other end was just when age kicked in. Sweat spot is in the middle. I try to keep these things in mind. Example. I bought a TV a couple years ago. My old TV was about 20 years old and the power supply had some sort of issue. It was either a diode getting weak or a capacitor was going bad. It had the little sine waves going up the screen. It was hard to see but was visible when the screen was all the same colour. Age was creeping up on this thing. Anyway, when my DirecTv box went out, it was years old too, I went to get me a new one. While there I saw this nice LCD TV sitting on a shelf and I might add, it looked so lonesome. lol It was marked down about half price. Hmmm, was it repaired or what? I asked a guy what the deal was. He said it was their display model. My first thought was that this could have already went through the first part of the curve. So, I asked how long it was on display. He said about 9 or 10 months. He thinks I am buying used and I'm thinking that this thing has already went through the bad part of its life. I walked out with a $800 TV for about $400. I think I got the better deal myself. Most of the drives, or other electronics, that I have either die under warranty or die when I am past caring. It has been a good long while since I had to return anything under warranty. I'm done showing my age, open your eyes again. LOL Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Mark Knecht wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: SNIP My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. That's my thoughts too. It doesn't matter what brand you go with, they all have some sort of failure at some point. They are not built to last forever and there is always the random failure, even when a week old. It's usually the loss of important data and not having a backup that makes it so bad. I'm not real picky on brand as long as it is a company I have heard of. One thing to keep in mind is statistics. For a single drive by itself it hardly matters anymore what you buy. You cannot predict the failure. However if you buy multiple identical drives at the same time then most likely you will either get all good drives or (possibly) a bunch of drives that suffer from similar defects and all start failing at the same point in their life cycle. For RAID arrays it's measurably best to buy drives that come from different manufacturing lots, better from different factories, and maybe even from different companies. Then, if a drive fails, assuming the failure is really the fault of the drive and not some local issue like power sources or ESD events, etc., it's less likely other drives in the box will fail at the same time. Cheers, Mark You make a good point too. I had a headlight to go out on my car once long ago. I, not thinking, replaced them both since the new ones were brighter. Guess what, when one of the bulbs blew out, the other was out VERY soon after. Now, I replace them but NOT at the same time. Keep in mind, just like a hard drive, when one headlight is on, so is the other one. When we turn our computers on, all the drives spin up together so they are basically all getting the same wear and tear effect. I don't use RAID, except to kill bugs, but that is good advice. People who do use RAID would be wise to use it. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Neil Bothwick writes: On Wed, 9 May 2012 21:44:19 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote: I guess I could remove anything running on my KDE desktop one by one, including plasmoids, and see if playback gets better. But not now, I finally have to actually do some work. I recently experienced slowdowns and delays with KDE. It turned out I had inadvertently disabled swap (I'd rearranged my partitions and not updated fstab). As soon as I gave it some swap space the delays disappeared. There's plenty of swap space available. With 16 G of RAM it should not be needed, but sometimes my load gets really really high, and when I can use the system again, there is 2-3 G of swap usage. I haven't found out yet what this is, it seems to happen when emerging things, maybe related to having 5 G tmpfs for portage, but when it happened the last time only 100 M were being used. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On May 10, 2012 6:54 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Paul Hartman wrote: On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: It doesn't matter what brand you go with Especially true since there are only 2 companies actually making consumer hard drives anymore: WD and Seagate. Both of them seem to know what they are doing, for the most part... Some hard drives fail at the beginning of their life. All hard drives fail at the end of their life. :) I'm about to show my age so please close your eyes. Pretty please. -_- Way back in the stone age, there was a guy that released a curve for electronics life. The failure rate is high at the beginning, especially for the first few minutes, then falls to about nothing, then after several years it goes back up again. At the beginning of the curve, the thought was it could be a bad solder job, bad components or some other problem. At the other end was just when age kicked in. Sweat spot is in the middle. I try to keep these things in mind. Example. I bought a TV a couple years ago. My old TV was about 20 years old and the power supply had some sort of issue. It was either a diode getting weak or a capacitor was going bad. It had the little sine waves going up the screen. It was hard to see but was visible when the screen was all the same colour. Age was creeping up on this thing. Anyway, when my DirecTv box went out, it was years old too, I went to get me a new one. While there I saw this nice LCD TV sitting on a shelf and I might add, it looked so lonesome. lol It was marked down about half price. Hmmm, was it repaired or what? I asked a guy what the deal was. He said it was their display model. My first thought was that this could have already went through the first part of the curve. So, I asked how long it was on display. He said about 9 or 10 months. He thinks I am buying used and I'm thinking that this thing has already went through the bad part of its life. I walked out with a $800 TV for about $400. I think I got the better deal myself. Heeey, that's a good point! Now I know that buying display units might be the best deal. Thanks, again! I'll now be keeping an eye open for such deals ;-) Rgds,
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Way back in the stone age, there was a guy that released a curve for electronics life. The failure rate is high at the beginning, especially for the first few minutes, then falls to about nothing, then after several years it goes back up again. That concept is much more general than just electronics; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Alex Schuster wrote: Neil Bothwick writes: On Wed, 9 May 2012 21:44:19 +0200, Alex Schuster wrote: I guess I could remove anything running on my KDE desktop one by one, including plasmoids, and see if playback gets better. But not now, I finally have to actually do some work. I recently experienced slowdowns and delays with KDE. It turned out I had inadvertently disabled swap (I'd rearranged my partitions and not updated fstab). As soon as I gave it some swap space the delays disappeared. There's plenty of swap space available. With 16 G of RAM it should not be needed, but sometimes my load gets really really high, and when I can use the system again, there is 2-3 G of swap usage. I haven't found out yet what this is, it seems to happen when emerging things, maybe related to having 5 G tmpfs for portage, but when it happened the last time only 100 M were being used. Wonko Is there a way to find out what is using swap? Maybe something related to the video is on swap which at times can be slow, certainly slower than ram. I have always wondered how to find this out myself. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
Is there a way to find out what is using swap? Maybe something related to the video is on swap which at times can be slow, certainly slower than ram. I have always wondered how to find this out myself. Well the OS uses swap, i dont know if its possible to then tie that directly to a process. You can find out if swap is being at all using with vmstat; so= swap out, si=swap in. For example, watch the following when you view the video adam@proxy ~ $ vmstat -S M 3 procs ---memory-- ---swap-- -io -system-- cpu r b swpd free buff cache si sobibo in cs us sy id wa 0 0 0 1290379 6617002656 108 107 2 3 93 2 0 0 0 1290379 661700 115 87 91 0 0 100 0 0 0 0 1290379 661700 0 0 59 54 0 0 100 0 0 0 0 1290379 661700 0 7 72 73 0 0 100 0
Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs
There's plenty of swap space available. With 16 G of RAM it should not be needed, but sometimes my load gets really really high, and when I can use the system again, there is 2-3 G of swap usage. I haven't found out yet what this is, it seems to happen when emerging things, maybe related to having 5 G tmpfs for portage, but when it happened the last time only 100 M were being used. Yeah so it wont be swap related. This sounds more like the desktop responsiveness issue discussed a while back. It might be worth googling that (main issue was fixed in later kernels) http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=articleitem=linux_2637_videonum=1 There's other things that may help, ie CONFIG_HZ_1000=y CONFIG_HZ=1000
