F*ing *nix...

[microsoft windows]

I thought the K6-2's were older than 2000. Weren't they from 1998 or something?

[nmd]

According to Wikipedia the K6-2 was released in May 1998.

[microsoft windows]

That was a pretty good guess on my part.

[whininggit]

Get yourself a 'RAM optimizer' app so you can free up that wasted RAM and then start hitting the disk instead. I do it all the time because I find the disk thrashing sounds soothing.

[microsoft windows]

I don't need any "RAM Optomizing" programs because I use Windows 2000 without extra crap running in the background. On a system like that, 512MB of RAM's more than enough to get the job done well.

[RoboKrikit]

I'm so masochistic, I use Seagate HDDs for RAM and Iomega Zip Drives for storage.  With all the clicking and thrashing I can barely hear myself think, and I like it!

[instantkamera]

I don't need any "RAM Optomizing" programs because I use Windows 2000 without extra crap running in the background. On a system like that, 512MB of RAM's more than enough to get the job done well.

In other news, 0 bytes of RAM are needed to do nothing.

I'm so masochistic, I use Seagate HDDs for RAM and Iomega Zip Drives for storage.  With all the clicking and thrashing I can barely hear myself think, and I like it!

my cpu's registers are on floppies and the cache is on sequential access tape.

[TexasFlood]

my cpu's registers are on floppies and the cache is on sequential access tape.

What, no paper tape?

[instantkamera]

What, no paper tape?

Show Image

L2 Cache.

[godly_music]

Windows Vista / 7 memory management is superior to everything that came before it (and so it satisfies the topic, Linux memory management gets a thumbs up too, even though it doesn't cache aggressively). Your views may hold more merit for the last era of computing where you had to scrounge for Kilobits. RAM is there to be used. If not used, it is wasted. Windows 7 eats up as much RAM as it can while there are no processes in need of it, so that programs can start quicker and the system becomes more responsive. It's called SuperFetch, learn it. The notion that you would have to optimize RAM is so ridiculous nowadays, I'm surprised that the guys who write these programs do so with a straight face.

We can be conscious about good programming practice and therefore low-footprint programs, and still use an OS that will cache Gigabits of our RAM just because it can. These two are not mutually exclusive, they rather complement each other well. I understand that we may get a bit OCD about memory and system tidiness in general, but that doesn't mean we can't get better and realize we have it completely backwards.

And no, (gasp) Windows 7 is not a RAM hog. 1.5 out of 4 Gig cached does not equal 1.5 Gig used by the system. Look at Task Manager, Processes. THAT is what the system uses. System processes don't occupy more than ~200 MB.

[instantkamera]

Im assuming this wasn't directed at me, as I am a HUGE fan of using RAM. I use it for everything, which is why I want 16GB in my next machine.

The linux kernel manages memory just fine:

Code: [Select]

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached                                                                                                            
Mem:          4050       3625        425          0        158       2320                                                                                                            
-/+ buffers/cache:       1146       2904                                                                                                                                              
Swap:         1992          0       1992                                                                                                                                              


~2.5GB cached of an available 4GB is fairly aggressive, but not so much that it would has caused ANYTHING to SO (which in itself is fine, so long as Im not swapping in, and as far as I know, linux favours the swap heavily for inactive pages). Just a note, this isnt even my machine, just a random I happen to be connected to, but I have found this to be true for most vanilla kernels. This can be tuned at the kernel level Im sure, but I have never needed to do so. There are lots of cool things that can increase performance by making use of idle RAM that can be activated on-the-fly, such as playing with tmpfs and different application scratches/tmp files.

[whininggit]

I know that ramdisks have gone a bit out of fashion these days, but I still like to have a small 512MB ramdisk (out of the systems 6GB RAM) for the web browser's "disk" cache. The reason? Although Firefox has a memory cache and a disk cache, the memory cache is dropped when you exit Firefox. The disk cache is persistant. Not having to go back to the hard disk all the time gives a huge performance benefit if the disk is being hammered for other reasons.

Neither Windows 7 nor Vista use huge amounts of memory. They use an appropriate amount for an operating system of their generation, but then make better use of free memory. The only issue with Vistas memory management is that superfetch begins caching as soon as it boots, which makes things very sluggish for the first few minutes. If you use sleep rather than shutdown, you can avoid this problem. I never had any stability issues with either Vista or 7.

[instantkamera]

I know that ramdisks have gone a bit out of fashion these days, but I still like to have a small 512MB ramdisk (out of the systems 6GB RAM) for the web browser's "disk" cache. The reason? Although Firefox has a memory cache and a disk cache, the memory cache is dropped when you exit Firefox. The disk cache is persistant. Not having to go back to the hard disk all the time gives a huge performance benefit if the disk is being hammered for other reasons.

That's one of the tweaks I was referring to for nix. tmpfs is superior to a traditional ramdisk though since you get the benefit of dynamic resizing and swapability.

[kidchunks]

Archlinux FTW

[nmd]

Archlinux would be my preferred choice but they dropped ATI support pretty hard for the video cards because of the open source drivers being trash(iirc.) If I had an nvidia card I'd use it if I didn't play any games.

Have a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard so that's my *nix fix.

[instantkamera]

Archlinux would be my preferred choice but they dropped ATI support pretty hard for the video cards because of the open source drivers being trash(iirc.) If I had an nvidia card I'd use it if I didn't play any games.

Have a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard so that's my *nix fix.

doesnt the AUR provide builds of Catalyst?

[nmd]

It didn't at the time I tried it. Someone on the forums had a tutorial on how to get it to work but it involved a lot of downgrading things, ended up being too much trouble to bother with.

It may now though, haven't checked recently.

[thebilgerat]

I have to say, if following clearly written instructions was too complicated there, SFC, hand your lappy to one of your privates who knows how to use a computer.

[zmurf]

In Ubuntu 10 most linksys cards should work straight out of the box. The thing with Linux is that with a distribution such as Ubuntu is that it comes with almost all drivers installed from the beginning. I have not in 8 year had to install a driver or do any "voodoo" stuff to make anything work in any of the Debian based distributions (such as Ubuntu).

[instantkamera]

It didn't at the time I tried it. Someone on the forums had a tutorial on how to get it to work but it involved a lot of downgrading things, ended up being too much trouble to bother with.

It may now though, haven't checked recently.

My question was actually rhetorical, it is

[thebilgerat]

Now that Linus Torvalds is American and his children hold American passports I'm sure every Linux install has NSA hooks embedded deep into the kernal.

Americans have nothing to hide-we gotta get dem terroristas!

[zmurf]

Windows Vista / 7 memory management is superior to everything that came before it (and so it satisfies the topic, Linux memory management gets a thumbs up too, even though it doesn't cache aggressively). Your views may hold more merit for the last era of computing where you had to scrounge for Kilobits. RAM is there to be used. If not used, it is wasted. Windows 7 eats up as much RAM as it can while there are no processes in need of it, so that programs can start quicker and the system becomes more responsive. It's called SuperFetch, learn it. The notion that you would have to optimize RAM is so ridiculous nowadays, I'm surprised that the guys who write these programs do so with a straight face.

We can be conscious about good programming practice and therefore low-footprint programs, and still use an OS that will cache Gigabits of our RAM just because it can. These two are not mutually exclusive, they rather complement each other well. I understand that we may get a bit OCD about memory and system tidiness in general, but that doesn't mean we can't get better and realize we have it completely backwards.

And no, (gasp) Windows 7 is not a RAM hog. 1.5 out of 4 Gig cached does not equal 1.5 Gig used by the system. Look at Task Manager, Processes. THAT is what the system uses. System processes don't occupy more than ~200 MB.

Yepp... This is very true. Microsoft have really made a awesome job with the memory handling in W7. Also the memory usage in .Net and it's garbage collector have been improved very much.

As you write, a good OS should use as much memory and CPU resources as possible at all time. There is almost always something to do... the important thing is that it gives back the resources when the user wants allocate them.

[bladamson]

I agree.  I never used to take PCs seriously unless they were running some variety of Unix, but the last two releases of Windows have been fairly decent!  (Although Vista seemed to have some pretty heavy system requirements.)  I'm especially impressed with Windows 7.  Though I still prefer Linux.  Probably just because it's what I'm used to (and the cost lol).

On the flip side, Linux seems to have gotten pretty decent as an end-user desktop OS, too.  We've been refurbishing $50 off-lease laptops at a place I do some contracting work for, putting Ubuntu on them, and selling them to low-income households at-cost as internet-centric machines, and everyone seems very happy with them so far.

So yea, these days I think the OS wars really only come down to what environment you prefer.

[keyboardlover]

Unix geeks...how DO they work???







Edit: do unix geeks still brag about not having to reboot as much as windows? When I used ubuntu, I had to reboot my machine way more often than my win 7 machine.

[iMav]

Edit: do unix geeks still brag about not having to reboot as much as windows? When I used ubuntu, I had to reboot my machine way more often than my win 7 machine.

Code: [Select]

lherzog@xunt:~$ uptime
07:58:40 up 645 days, 21:36,  1 user,  load average: 7.05, 5.60, 3.76
lherzog@xunt:~$
lherzog@xunt:~$ date
Sun Dec 26 08:03:41 CST 2010
lherzog@xunt:~$

[ch_123]

Sounds like Ubuntu is to fail. Or PEBKAC. Probably both.

[keyboardlover]

Well I used auto-update. It worked pretty much the same way it does in Windows.

[bladamson]

Unix geeks...how DO they work???

Show Image

Thoughts of sex require energy that could be spent hacking. :P

Asexual hackers unite! XD

I was in a relation**** with a unix geek for about 7 years.  Ultimately, I think it was unfulfilling for both of us.  Perhaps I'm aging, but I just don't really feel the need to get laid very often these days, and my head is a lot clearer for it lol.

As for the huge beard....  Yuck-o!  RMS makes us all look like crazy people, but I guess someone has to do the job...

Warning:  Totally Disgusting:

[SPECIAL][/SPECIAL]

PS: How do I get rid of that funk that is appearing after SPECIAL embedded video blocks?

[nmd]

Only times I ever had to reboot on *nix was when I updated a kernel. I have to reboot Windows * whenever I install/uninstall some programs, most updates, etc.

[iMav]

How do I get rid of that funk that is appearing after SPECIAL embedded video blocks?

Like this:

(hint, just use the YouTube BBcode and the vid ID)

Wow.  That was nasty.

[bladamson]

Only times I ever had to reboot on *nix was when I updated a kernel. I have to reboot Windows * whenever I install/uninstall some programs, most updates, etc.

It seems like the crappy rural power grid here goes down more often than I have to reboot, and I'm too cheap to replace the batteries in my UPSes.  Lol.  It's been hell with all this snow recently.  09:28:56 up 2 days, 15:18, 17 users,  load average: 0.98, 0.81, 0.66  Sadface.

That being said, I tend to reboot whenever the kernel or libc gets upgraded, or when linux's totally awful sound driver situation makes skype stop working right until I do a cold boot. -_-'

[instantkamera]

Code: [Select]

lherzog@xunt:~$ uptime
07:58:40 up 645 days, 21:36,  1 user,  load average: 7.05, 5.60, 3.76
lherzog@xunt:~$
lherzog@xunt:~$ date
Sun Dec 26 08:03:41 CST 2010
lherzog@xunt:~$

holy load avg batman

[iMav]

holy load avg batman

It's a quad-core system...so not as bad as it might appear.