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git add slow; git status quick
by Tim Connors 16 Dec '13

16 Dec '13

git beginner here, so forgive me. As part of change management of a couple hundred servers, we do a regular 'git add .' on a central repository of half a million files, followed by a bit of munging, then a 'git commit -a -m ...' (rhel5, so 'git -a' is 'git -A' elsewhere). 'git add .' is very very slow at finding the additions and modifications (we don't care about the '-u' deletions at this stage, because of the future munging required) and staging them. I suspect it's actually staging every single file rather than just changes. 'git status -s' on a freshly changed repository prior to doing any git add is really quite quick (no, it's not a cold or undersized cache issue), and finds all additions, deletions and modifications. We could simply pipe that rather small output to 'git add' and it would be much much quicker at staging them (er, I think; but also, a bit of a kludge). Any known reason why git-add would appear to be recursing through the entire tree staging even unchanged files, and not just acting on the changed files that git-status obviously can find very quickly? Any missing bit of git magic I could be applying? -- Tim Connors

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Graphics driver work update
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 16 Dec '13

16 Dec '13

Some time back I was mentioning a problem I was having with the NVidia closed src driver. Russel Coker made a sugestion I checked out the open src driver. Now I have had a look at the state of progress on both NVidia and ATI/AMD cards and the big open src improver is for Radeon R600g driver. This covers ATI/AMD Radeon HD3000 to 6870 cards, (NOT the 6900 cards these being covered by the Radeonsi driver). For the R600g driver benchmarks using 3.11.1 kernel and Mesa 9.2 (both being in current debian testing) show that 3D apps were running at around 2/3rds of the frame rate as the windows driver. There were plenty of reports from users saying it was running all linux games with the quality sliders at max at 60 fps, there being only a single report slower than that and it said it was smooth and highly playable. All stated the driver was very stable and one could switch to a kernel console and back to X without crashing the system. With kernel 3.12.0 and mesa 10, this of course is fairly new, benchmarks comparing with windows 7 produced the same results, ie the driver was as fast as the one on windows. This is all excellent news for opensource Linux. Interestingly around 2 years ago when the AMD open source liason officer was asked if the opensource driver would EVERY get as fast as the then windows driver he replied it would and would likely end up faster. His reasons for saying that was he said that the opensource was a far cleaner and simpler driver than the windows counterpart, not having to worry about backwards compatibilty and a binary interface to the kernel. Lindsay

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Debian on USB, and Seagate USB 2TB drive
by Mark Trickett 14 Dec '13

14 Dec '13

Hello Cogniscenti, I am wanting to install Debian to a USB stick. Has anyone attempted this, and what problems and special techniques are required? I have UNetbootin, but might need to get on a later install, this IBM Thinkpad is still running Hardy Heron, and I need to unjam the package management, it is wedged with a removed older kernel, but the modules not removed, they were removed in the wrong order. There should be a way to force. Even then, with 256Mb of RAM, and limited HDD space, more to the point to migrate to next PC. On the latter point, I am wanting to transfer the contents of the home directories to a 2TB Seagate external USB3 HDD. It appears to be NTFS, and the Hardy Heron support is "flaky". I can attach to another later laptop with Debian (Gnome3 and not preferred) or Knoppix on USB. Any comments about resizing and repartitioning? I would like to retain a NTFS stub with the Seagate software, which includes the serial number of the drive. Regards, Mark Trickett

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A bash question
by Allan Duncan 13 Dec '13

13 Dec '13

I have a rc.local script that runs fine in csh, but I'd like to change it to sh, but I've had no success at it. #! /usr/bin/tcsh if `ping -w 1 -c 1 -n 192.168.1.3 | grep -o "1 packets"` == "1 packets" mount /nfs/bulk2 While we are at it, is there a more elegant way of mounting the remote partition only if that machine is on?

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iptables-save output using dotted quad netmask rather than CIDR
by Tim Connors 13 Dec '13

13 Dec '13

iptables-save on rhel5 outputs: -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -s 12.3.4.5/255.255.0.0 -p tcp -m tcp -j ACCEPT whereas rhel6 outputs -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -s 12.3.4.5/16 -p tcp -m tcp -j ACCEPT Wanting to normalise iptables-save to one form or the other (preferably using the dotted quad netmask), the best I can come up with is a line by line grep (for optimisation perhaps, since a match wont happen often) for /<number> and then extract the number, pass to cidr2mask, and replace /<number> in that line (this is part of a self contained shell script that will be executed on the fly on another host, so I'd rather not rely on anything that isn't already in RHEL, ie no writing a perl sript myself unless it's a one liner perl -e thing). What flag to iptables-save am I missing where it does this for me? -- Tim Connors

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gnucash alternatives
by James Harper 13 Dec '13

13 Dec '13

I've been tinkering with gnucash, and the main limitation is that it doesn't support multiuser access. Can anyone recommend an alternative open source accounting package with similar features (needs to support invoicing). Thanks James

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hpsa driver and raid expand
by James Harper 13 Dec '13

13 Dec '13

I've just added 2 new disks to my HP server, expanded the array, and then expanded the volume. IIRC the old cciss driver would notify Linux that the device had expanded, but the hpsa driver doesn't appear to be doing this - /dev/sda is still the same size in /proc/partitions? Is there a way to force Linux to reprobe? I know Linux isn't Windows and I'll still need a reboot after expanding the partition (unless that's changed since I did it last?), but I still thought Linux could notice if a block device increased in size... Thanks James

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Diomidis Spinellis: The Birth of Standard Error
by Rodney Brown 13 Dec '13

13 Dec '13

http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20131211/ Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society <http://www.tuhs.org/>, described the birth of the /standard error/ concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries have embraced this concept. ...

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owncloud
by Brian May 13 Dec '13

13 Dec '13

On 13 December 2013 08:20, Matthew Cengia <mattcen(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Craig, take a look at Owncloud as a calendar/contact/file server; I hook > up DavDroid and CalDav Sync Adaptor to that (have had this set up for a > month or so now since I wiped my phone, installed CM and shunned Google), > with no significant issues so far. DavDroid does both contacts and > calendars, but it displayed all my calendars in one colour (may've been > fixed in a recent update) which is the only reason I grabbed CSA instead. > I got sick of Owncloud 5.x. It would transfer many files (when I only updated one), come up with random transfer errors transferring the files, retry, complain about conflicts with the files it just uploaded (as I only had one client there should not be any conflicts), automatically retry again, and eventually succeed. I see that there is now Owncloud 6.x, so I should try it. It might have improved now. -- Brian May <brian(a)microcomaustralia.com.au>

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7 inch android tablet recommendations
by Bianca Gibson 13 Dec '13

13 Dec '13

Hi everyone, My 2012 nexus 7 isn't turning on anymore but is still in warranty. I'll be getting a refund for it pretty soon and may replace it. I was mainly using it for uni stuff, so I'm not sure it's worth replacing now I've finished. I need to think about it a bit more. I liked my nexus 7 apart from it breaking. Something sturdier would be ideal, I won't necessarily break another one with such good timing. Does anyone have the 2013 nexus 7, how are you finding it? The price range I'm looking at is $300ish. Cheers, Bianca

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