It’s been almost an eternity since I’ve had Linux on any desktop. Fedora was known as RedHat Linux, Ubuntu didn’t exist, and Windows XP was the norm (and some argue it still is!). While I’ve always used the Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone CentOS on server systems, I’ve strictly run Windows or OSX on all desktops.

Things changed recently when I got myself an Asus EeePC 1005P netbook. It’s quite a nice machine - but it just seems to thrash around a little under the shipped Windows 7 install. It doesn’t get any better replacing it with Windows 7 Ultimate either. I’d heard a lot about running Linux on netbooks on the various geek sites (slashdot.org etc) and I figured I’d give it a try.

With my RHEL background, I decided to go with Fedora 13. Installation was painless, it booted and just ran. With about half the memory footprint of Windows 7, the increase in speed was quite noticeable. A faster hard disk and things would be much nicer - especially if I swapped out the standard HDD for a solid state drive.

As far as compatibility goes I was more than impressed. The onboard wifi, bluetooth, ethernet, even display controller were detected and ran perfectly - right out of the box. Power management seems to be much better implemented. A few simple scripts later and I had the Super Hybrid Engine working correctly as well. Much, much better than my last attempt at linux on the desktop!

What impressed me even more is that I turned up to do a contracting gig and needed to print to the office printer. The first thing I thought was “oh no, here we go”. Imagine my surprise when I pointed Fedora to the printers IP address and away it went. No external drivers, no fuss. Even advanced features like duplex printing worked out of the box.

In summary, Fedora has come a long, long way since the RHL days and I’ve been using it every day for around 3 weeks now with no major issues at all. Keep up the good work!

The BBCs Radio 1 have always been known for their dedication to dance music. The latest installation is Essential Mix with Swedish House Mafia. As always, you can stream it at your leisure :)

I’ve just finished uploading the last of the changes to the AirServices DAPs.

These are now available over on the xplane section.

It’s been a long time since I started this project - nearly 8 months of solid work - however its starting to get close to completion and the Digital CoPilot web site is now up and running!

My aims for this device is to be simple, user friendly, and a very handy tool in the quest to make aviation safer for everyone.

As with everything I do, any feedback is welcome :)

A while ago I updated my main fileserver (which was an old P4!) to a new Intel Core i5 CPU & associated hardware. I’ve managed to do some more tweaking today and found some very interesting things.

All Intel i5 CPUs (and probably the i3 & i7 as well) have this feature called Intel Turbo Boost. In short, what this does is to make your CPU run faster when it needs to - and as long as it doesn’t get too hot etc. This gives a nice performance boost without having to overclock the CPU all the time to squeeze out a little more performance.

There are however a few things you need to configure correctly to make sure Turbo Boost works on your system:

1. Configure cpuspeed to use the acpi_cpufreq module. Once this is done, have a look at scaling_available_frequencies. You should see something like this:

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cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies
3326000 3325000 3192000 3059000 2926000 2793000 2660000 2527000 2394000 1197000

This tells us we can scale between 1197Mhz and 3325Mhz. Note the entry for 3326Mhz. This is the way linux shows us the Intel Turbo Boost functionality.

1. It’s probably wise to use the ondemand governer for cpufreq. This will allow the system to ramp up its clock speed as required, then back it off automatically when things are a bit quieter.

2. Check to see that loads in Xen DomUs are correctly ramping up the CPU speed. To do this, I used this command:

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watch "xm list; echo; cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep MHz"

This will show what DomU systems are running every 2 seconds, as well as the frequency that each core is running at. My system is currently an i5 661 (2 cores, 4 threads), so I see:

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cpu MHz         : 1197.000
cpu MHz         : 1197.000
cpu MHz         : 3325.082
cpu MHz         : 3325.082

The last 2 entries are the hyperthreads for core0 and core1 respectively. You will note that the frequency of the extra threads do not change - but the cores will. When you do some activity in a DomU, you should see one or both of the cores clock up as required.

I love technology when it works properly :)