Boring Ubuntu Goodness.

You know what?

Ubuntu is becoming a boring platform.

It's stable. Mostly.

For the most part, a month or two after the release most of the major niggles are gone and so are most of the minor ones.

It's scary!

This is starting to feel something like the kind of major OS release that is expected to come from a major corporation listed on the NASDAC (NASCAR?) or NYSE or some other pretend bourse. It works. Rather well. It works rather better than the 'other' offering which is so very expensive and costly. And it's neither expensive or costly.

If you're an end-user, consider working harder for a moment to understand how it works and how much you can save the environment and your pocket by changing OS.

If you're a corporate boss, consider the above - but increase that cost of change by the factor of the number of employees who would need training to make the change.


There is much talk of being 'greener', much talk of saving the planet.

Start with your OS.

Save the planet. Save yourself. The easiest way.

Cheers!! T.

PS Reverend Kris Korda previously suggested that the best way to save the planet was to kill yourself. While the Reverend was rather close to the best solution, this one is likely to have a higher uptake than the one the Reverend suggested and therefore a bigger effect. On the other hand, the one which was suggested about the second coming sounds like rather a good plan. T.

More on overclocking your Nvidia graphics card

In an earlier article, I mentioned ways to overclock your Nvidia graphics card in Ubuntu 9.04.

There is one more detail you will need.

Normally, when you restart the system, the overclocking settings will be lost.

Here's how to fix that:

Open a terminal and type "gnome-session-properties"
Add a new item
Call it 'nvclock'
The command is 'nvclock -b coolbits -n 575.000 -m 999.000' in my case.

The -n is the GPU speed and the -m is the memory speed.

Therefore your system will now start with an overclocked graphics card.

If you're using this command in a shell, there may be an error if you are trying to push your card further than the 'known' safe limits. You can add the '-f' switch to force the overclocking, both at the command line and in the gnome-session-properties panel. Sometimes, nvclock doesn't correctly identify the card. If you're sure you know better, then you make the choice. It identified my GTX260 as a standard edition rather than a special overclock edition. Therefore, I forced the settings.

Remember, some parameters may be too extreme and damage your hardware.

Peace out...

Overclocking CPU, Overclocking Nvidia display cards and fans.

It has been a while since I did any overclocking of CPUs. I got into a little bit in the heyday of it all, but didn't have the time and couldn't be bothered wasting the money on the exotic cooling systems available to get more performance out of my CPU.

After all, CPU prices fall quite quickly and cooling gear is more costly than CPUs. Not to mention that the cooling gear you buy today won't (or probably won't) fit or have adapter plates etc available for the CPU you replace it with in a year or so.

The approach of unbridled overclocking is a waste of money in my opinion. However, if that's your hobby, if it's your thing then that's just cool. It's not my thing.

For me, overclocking is about using older or lower cost hardware and making it go a little quicker so that it's able to give more than the task at hand needs. After all, why drive a 1.3 litre buzzbox when a 1.8 will use about the same fuel if it's properly tuned and carefully driven, but will give you ever so much more performance if and when you need it. Make sense?


There's one machine I tend to use the most just for surfing, e-mails, quotes, watching videos over my shoulder when I'm supposed to be working - just a general duties machine. Here's the config:

* AMD Opteron 144 CPU, stock 1.8 GHz
* Zalman CPU cooler with radial fins and a 90 mm fan
* 2 Gb DDR266 RAM
* Asus GTX260 overclocked display card
* 24" Fujitsu widescreen LCD
* 800 W modular power factor corrected PSU (sorry, forgot what kind and I can't be bothered to open the case right now - however, the fan is variable speed and 'runs on' until a temperature set-point is reached when the machine is switched off in software).
* 1 x 120 Gb PATA HDD for Boot
* 1 x 320 GB SATA HSS for my home folder
* 1 x 90 mm case fan
* CD-R burner
* DVD + - everything burner
* and a whole heap of other stuff hanging off the USB ports.

Yep - a rather plain office machine with a quick-ish graphics card. Legacy hardware for the most part.


As I mentioned, the CPU at stock runs 1.8 GHz. It's no prize winner - it's just fine for most day to day stuff under Ubuntu.

However, I wanted a little more grunt and didn't want to spend any more on it. So, a bit of quick overclocking in BIOS and we're on our way. I've boosted it to 2.3 GHz which is mild compared to some more serious Opteron 144 overclockers, however, I didn't want to spend more money on exotic cooling. The trick to remember is to set the overclocking to asynchronous. There's a big chance that you can drive the CPU and memory harder but that the bus may not be able to take as much pushing. Experiment at your own peril. I will.

The Zalman cooler has an external fan speed controller. Like most people, I believed faster is better so had it cranked up to maximum speed - about 2500 rpm. When the fan is running at maximum speed, initially the temperature is stable. I just installed some temperature monitoring software which I'll talk about in another article. I wanted to see what difference fan speed made to cooling.

With the fan at maximum speed and the CPU driven at 100% for an hour, the temperature peaked at 60C. However, dropping the fan to 1400 rpm the temperature fell to 38C after about ten minutes at about 25% load. Woot!

However, as soon as you put the CPU and GPU under load, the temperature will climb again. After half an hour the CPU temperature was 59C and stable.


As I've mentioned before, I've been twiddling with overclocking the display card and have mentioned nvclock-gtk. It has a setting which allows the fan duty cycle to be adjusted manually. I had set that at around 80% thinking faster fans, better cooling, etc. Wrong. Dead wrong.

Allow the fan speed to remain under automatic control. The duty cycle will vary as it needs. The result? 72C with the fan running fast and 63C with the fan on automatic. The duty cycle runs between about 35% and 85% under 100% load conditions on the CPU and the GPU but it remains pleasantly cool.


Result? Dropping the CPU fan speed and setting the GPU fan speed to automatic gives lower temperatures. Here's the results:
* Core 0 = 59
* CPU fan = 1394 rpm
* Sys Temp = 50C
* CPU Temp = 60C
* AUX 2 Temp (mobo) = 60C
* GPU = 67C
* Display Adapter Ambient = 55C
* both HDD = 52C.

In real terms, the air flow needs to be improved to cool this machine more effectively.


For me, all of the above is great news. My workstation and another server are under my corner desk here in the office. The highest temperature recorded under the desk in summer was 73C. BBQ pork legs - my legs!! There's no chance I could slide some fun under there.


I'm happy to help you get somewhere with a result for your rig. Comment or e-mail and I will help you.


Peace out...

Overclocking Nvidia GTX260... and others

As you know, this blog is basically a catalogue of the adventures I've had under Linux in whatever version is the current one at the time of writing.

Around October last year, as I was building my workstation up by adding a bigger monitor (24") I needed to add a bigger graphics card to get the most out of the monitor. After all, 1900 x 1200 at 24 bit depth is rather a lot of screen real estate to drive at a reasonable speed so that it's useful as a business / graphics workstation.

I ended up with an Asus GTX260, which is of course and Nvidia chipset display device. It wasn't a regular one, as far as I could tell, but a special version overclocked to 576 MHz on the GPU and 999 MHz on the memory. Not bad.

However, after a look at nvidia-settings, it seemed that I was only getting 300 MHz of speedy goodness. I bought something quicker and I wanted to find out how to make do that.

Here's how:

For most purposes, nvidia-settings is what you will need, in conjunction with the most recent properly supported drivers from Nvidia. By properly supported, I mean the ones that Ubuntu ships with the distro or upgrades to along the way. There are some issues that can come up if you go to a 'too new' version in that other stuff can break. Stay leading edge, not bleeding edge.

Nvidia-settings is pretty simple - it lets you adjust a few things here and there such as anisotropic filtering, texture, etc. That's all pretty nice.

However, if you add one more option to your xorg.conf, you can unlock the overclocking side of things if it is available for your card.

First off, sudo apt-get install nvclock. It's a powerful command line tool for overclocking. I'm not sure what interdependencies there are between nvidia-settings and nvclock in regard to overclocking, but it just seems to work. Try it. There are some pretty cool command line features available in nvclock, but only use those if you know what you're doing. If you make a mistake you can either weaken or destroy your display card and potentially other hardware in your system.

The option to change in your xorg.conf is to add the line:
"Options" "Coolbits" "1"
... and that's it.

This allows overclocking to be selected in nvidia-settings' graphical interface. You can find it in the section "Clock Frequencies". Tick "Enable Overclocking" and off you go! Make sure that you know the maximum GPU and Memory clock for your card and for your cooling configuration. A smart move is to allow Power Miser to run. It is enabled by default. This means your card only goes to its maximum speeds on demand. Saves power, saves heat. I won't tell you how to disable it - if you're that keen, practice your Google-fu my friend.

As this card is an overclocked version, it also displays that there are two more performance settings. Default is 0, faster is 1 and highest is 2. If your nvidia-settings shows you this kind of information, then you are lucky enough to know what maximum speeds you can safely set and forget. If that kind of information isn't shown, then do a little research for the quickest reliable settings for your board, subtract say 10% and work it up from there. If the high performance speed minus 10% is less than the 'stock' speed, overclocking may not be for your card. It's up to you.


You can often overclock a touch faster if you can run your system cooler.

Here's a sweet cheat to do that:
sudo apt-get install nvclock-gtk
... Easy!

Run nvclock_gtk from the command line. It's a GUI'ed app for overclocking. Don't touch the overclock part of it otherwise it will take away your adjustments from the changes you made in nvidia-settings.

The part we're interested in is the fan duty cycle. The normal fan duty cycle set for my card is 40%. Tweak it to say 80%. Fan RPM will increase, perhaps a minor increase in noise but you will notice your temperature begin to reduce. The graphics card's temperature is for the most part ruled by the ambient temperature inside your system case and is influenced by ambient temperature in the room where the system case is. Obvious, huh?

In my case, "nvclock -T" reports GPU temperature = 60C and Board Temperature = 49C. This is a drop of 3C in about four minutes or so. I can feel a bit more breeze around the case with my bare feet (it's a tower sitting on the floor under my desk) which I'm sure will be a welcome relief in summer.

Any questions? Ask and I will try to assist.


Peace out.

Speech to text...

So far, the most recent upgrade has, for the most part, been fairly OK.

Bluetooth still sucks the big red one. Howeverm what can be done with Bluetooth can be done with USB wired connections, and it actually works. More or less. YMMV, etc.

My next big goal is speech to text. I talk faster than I type and God knows I type rather quickly. So... as soon as I find some Ubuntu and Debian speech to text apps I will review those and post here for your amusement or edification.

In the meanwhile, here's a page for your amusement which is totally SFW, despite the gratuitous use of Japanese school girls and pussy.  http://www.ceilingcat.com/img/47aug29-smuggling-your-cat.jpg

Meh.

See you soon.

Ubuntu 9.04 and Bluetooth.

It doesn't work so well.

Which is funny because when I was testing 9.04 beta only a few weeks before the final release it did work, but caused some havoc with the Nvidia 188.xx drivers so I rolled back, looking forward to being able to happily sync my phone with Evolution.

Having done some research, I have found out that Bluetooth and 9.04 work OK but only with certain hardware. The bad news is that the hardware it works with is not so common in general. One of the most popular Bluetooth dongles (KY-BT100) doesn't work with bluez-gnome or bluezman.

If I get it going, I will let you know.

Free .co.cc domain names

You are not going to believe this stuff. Seriously.

The .co.cc domain is giving away domain names ending in .co.cc without the usual crap of tags and embedded things when you choose a domain name.

Some of the shorter and more obvious ones are either gone already or available for a fee.

Doesn't it sound rather like the common name for a male chicken? Isn't that something you can twist into something more commercial? Or at least genital? Go get your cocc into this. Heck - it's free! I'm not even an affiliate - I earn nothing from this - I just wanna give you a hot tip. Nothing required in return.

Check it out: http://www.co.cc/

I'm sure that some of you clever and dirty minded fxckers can find something that's deeeee-lish and profitable. I know I have.


Peace out.