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Showing posts from February 8, 2014

A Faster System

I'm always looking for ways to speed up my computer, especially when it comes to the boot process and loading applications. A good overall discussion or improving system performance is at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Maximizing_Performance , just remember that it focuses on the ArchLinux distro, not the Mandriva (now Mageia) distro I use. READAHEAD A useful utility is readahead . According to its manpage, readahead populates the page cache with data from a file so that subsequent reads from that file will not block on disk I/O. On my Mandriva 2010 system, the default installation of readahead places a default file at /var/lib/readahead/default.early . To create custom files based on your system, you should reboot the system and pause the GRUB menu and add the following to the command line. init=/sbin/readahead-collector This will examine your system as it boots and create a list of what files are to be loaded in the order that they are loaded. The configuratio

Upgrade Mageia 2 or Mageia3 to Mageia 4

Back in the early days of Linux, the changes to the OS were so dramatic that even when updating withing the same distro, in-place point release updates were problematic enough and it was always recommended that a major version release be done from scratch. There were just too many major changes to the underlying subsystems and package naming conventions. Doing an in-place update was just asking for trouble. Modern distros have matured quite a bit although there are occasionally some major subsystem changes being made. Yet it's never been easier to do an in-pace major version upgrade. I just did the upgrade on several Mageia3 systems and the results were consistent and satisfactory, not to mention simple. Step 0. Always backup critical information. Have a Mageia3 recovery disc on hand. From GUI Step 1. $ sudo mgaapplet-upgrade-helper --new_distro_version=4 Done. From CLI Step 1. Fully update the packages you now have installed. $ sudo urpmi --auto-update