Re: [SLUG] Advice Request for moving a Ubuntu installation to a larger disk and 4Gb RAM

2009-10-27 Thread Alan Tyree 
On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Daniel Pittman dan...@rimspace.netwrote:

 Alan L Tyree a...@austlii.edu.au writes:
  On Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:39:48 +1100
  Robert Collins robe...@robertcollins.net wrote:
 
  On Tue, 2009-10-27 at 13:15 +1100, Bill Donoghoe wrote:
  
   1. What do I need to do to get Ubuntu to use 4Gb RAM? My current
   Jaunty installation only recognises around 3Gb.  Is this just a kernel
   upgrade or 
 
  If I remember correctly we don't support  3GB on 32-bit installs
  anymore - the performance overhead is terrible.

 [...]

  al...@stormy:~/data$ uname -a
  Linux stormy 2.6.26-2-686-bigmem #1 SMP Sat Oct 17 18:25:48 UTC 2009
  i686 GNU/Linux
 
  I haven't noticed any performance hit. Box is Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU
  E8400 @ 3.00GHz with 4GB of memory. My stuff is mostly NOT cpu intensive,
  but I do an occasional compile (LyX) and LaTeX large documents. No
  observable change.

 It is there; the two common problems are that low memory fills, causing
 extra
 competition, and that your memory bandwidth is terribly reduced through
 extra
 TLB flushing to bounce data up above the easy line.

 You probably don't notice any performance hit because, frankly, almost
 every
 computer you can buy — including the one in your mobile phone — is
 sufficiently overpowered for the work it is asked to do[1] that you can
 sacrifice ten or twenty percent of performance[2] without noticing.

Daniel


That's interesting, Daniel. So what are my tradeoffs. Run the normal kernel:
faster but only 2.5gb; Run the bigmem kernel and suffer the performance but
have more memory.

Aside from the work mentioned above, I also edit some really big video files
and do ffmpeg transformations on them.

So, is there some way of choosing which of the above is the best option for
me?

Cheers,
Alan



 Footnotes:
 [1]  ...most of the time; 3D games and some science work do push the
 limits.
 Most regular desktop use doesn't.

 [2]  Typically, this is more than running the 32-bit bigmem kernel costs.

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Re: [SLUG] Indexing under Linux

2009-05-27 Thread Alan Tyree 
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:34 PM, Jon jonjer...@optusnet.com.au wrote:

 I have been asked by the editor of The Indexer -- the academic journal of
 indexers worldwide -- to write a brief non-technical piece about indexing
 under Linux; and by 'indexing' here I mean creating the A-Z indexes found at
 the backs of books and journals. My impression is that there is currently no
 specific Linux indexing software and no projects going on to create any, but
 because of the many meanings of 'index' it's hard to search the Web for this
 conclusively. Does anyone have any information they would like to share on
 book indexing software projects specifically for Linux, either free or
 commercial? Respond directly to me if you don't think others will be
 interested.

 I will take silence to mean 'No'.


I have been interested in this, and would be very interested if you turn up
anything.

LaTeX and OpenOffice both use the inline method of indexing. This is not
much used by professional indexers since it is fiendishly difficult to
maintain consistency. It is mainly used by authors who attempt to index as
they go.

Tools like Refex help a lot on the consistency front, but it is still hard
slogging.

There are a number of (Windows) programs that are used by professional
indexers. I haven't seen any since they are quite expensive (and I don't
have a windows machine). I get the impression that they are a modern version
of index cards, that is, the index is built more or less separately and then
the manuscript is read and each unit (paragraph or section or whatever) and
indexed appropriately.

Cheers,
Alan


 Thanks,

 Jon.


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