Fedora 19 LXDE Spin Cleanup

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Most of my software development takes place on a Debian 7 “wheezy” running LXDE. It is stable and provides me with everything I need. I also keep a copy of Fedora on a different partition on my hard disk, the attraction being the latest versions of gcc and glibc. In this article I will take a look at the latest Fedora release.

Usually when installing Linux, my main concern is the RAM memory. In my work I need as much as I can get. One option would be to start with a regular server install, and add X11, LXDE and everything else on top of it. Building such a system from scratch is not exactly difficult. However, today I’m lazy, and I’ll go for a Fedora LXDE Spin install. I will remove after installation everything I don’t need.

The download page is here. The installer still has some problems, for example updating an existing partition tends to get it confused. First boot in the new system I open a terminal and run free command. It uses 220MB of memory, which is not so bad.

System cleanup

The procedure is simple, I look at ps aux output and remove or disable everything I don’t really need.

First one to go is Clipit. It is a clipboard manager that tracks your every key stroke. As you start the system, it tells you politely what it intends to do, and it advises you not to type passwords. I have no idea why would anybody run this on his computer in a post-Snowden world. So, I open a terminal, su and

# yum remove clipit

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Light Debian Linux for Family and Friends

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A friend of yours tells you one day he’s heard so much about Linux and he’s decided to install it on his Windows machine. His computer is already a few years old, a Windows 7 or maybe a Windows XP, and he’s come to you for advice. Could you please help him to install it? No problem, happy to oblige!

The only concern I would have is the RAM memory. It is virtually impossible to persuade anybody to add more memory to an old box, we better make sure the desktop environment we chose will not be slower than his Windows. A memory comparison of various Debian desktop environments helps in this moment:

Debian 7 Memory (MB)

Debian 7 Memory (MB)

I usually install for them Debian because it is rock solid, and it will more than tamper with some of the bad habits they accumulated as Microsoft users. Once Debian installed, using it is as easy as using Ubuntu. Installation is no different once you go trough it once or twice.

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How to Install and Configure RCP100 Routing Suite on Debian 7

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Software-based routers have always played a role in the Internet, and are becoming increasingly important in data centers due to the convergence of video, mobile, and cloud services. Data traffic no longer moves simply from the subscriber into the network and then out again. Instead, most of the traffic is located inside the data center between various application servers within the network.

All this traffic can be routed easily using software-based routers running on commodity PC hardware. Such a router looks like just another server in the data center, and most of the time it is implemented using open-source software. The availability of the source code and the right to modify the software enables the unlimited tuning and optimization of the network traffic.

This article describes how to set up RCP100 routing suite on a Debian 7 computer. RCP100 is a full OSPF/RIP router for Linux. It works on 64bit computers, it is licensed under GPL, and it is actively developed.

The computer I am setting up has two Ethernet interfaces, eth0 (192.168.20.20) and eth1 (10.1.10.1), and it is meant to connect a small private network segment (10.1.10.0/24) to the larger public network. To isolate the private network, I configure Network Address Translation on the router and enable the firewall. Computers on the private network are assigned IP addresses using DHCP. The router also provides NTP and DNS proxy services.

Network setup

Network setup

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MALLOC_CHECK_ and MALLOC_PERTURB_

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Recent versions of Linux glibc (2.x) include a a malloc() implementation tunable using environment variables. This allows the user to diagnose allocation problems such as heap corruption, double free etc.

When MALLOC_CHECK_ is set to 3, a diagnostic message is printed on stderr and the program is aborted. A value of 0 disables the diagnostic – see man malloc for more details.

Setting the MALLOC_PERTURB_ environment variable causes the malloc functions in libc to return memory which has been wiped and initialized with the byte value of the environment variable. Setting MALLOC_PERTURB_ to zero disables the feature.

No special arguments need to be passed during program compilation. These diagnostics work on any precompiled programs. Unlike valgrind, the speed of execution is not affected.

$ export MALLOC_CHECK_=3
$ export MALLOC_PERTURB_=$(($RANDOM % 255 + 1))

How to Download and Burn YouTube Videos on a DVD in Linux

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This is a short tutorial on how to burn YouTube videos on a DVD. It might come in handy if you want to watch them on a big TV, or if you want to send them to friends. Or maybe you published them on YouTube for your small business, and you need to send a copy to a client. There are basically three steps: downloading, converting the video to MPEG format, and building the DVD image. All these steps can be accomplished in Linux with free open-source programs.

Downloading

An easy way to download is to use Video DownloadHelper Firefox extension. It is just a matter of starting the video in YouTube and saving it – always choose the highest quality version available when saving.

Video DownloadHelper Mozilla Extension

Video DownloadHelper Mozilla Extension

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Installing net-snmp MIBs on Ubuntu and Debian

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Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet-standard protocol for managing devices on IP networks. net-snmp is the main SNMP implementation for Linux and BSD platforms. On Ubuntu or Debian net-snmp tools are installed as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install snmp

You can also install snmpd package. This package contains the SNMP agent.

Installing MIBs

For licensing reasons, net-snmp package installs only a small number of MIBs in /usr/share/mibs directory. A large number of standard MIBs can be installed using snmp-mibs-downloader package:

$ sudo apt-get install snmp-mibs-downloader
$ sudo download-mibs

To have the new MIBs recognized by net-snmp, edit /etc/snmp/snmp.conf file as follows:

$ cat /etc/snmp/snmp.conf
mibs +ALL
$

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Ubuntu Desktop Memory Comparison

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Ubuntu 13.04 comes in a number of different variants, covering a wide range of hardware platforms. I am particularly interested in these variants because my computer is a 6 years old dual-core AMD 64bit with 1GB of memory.

As the Internet stopped getting faster, two years ago I’ve decided not to buy another computer. I don’t “read” flash heavy sites, I guess nobody likes them anyway. For games, movies, and music what I have is more than enough. I do need to keep an eye on memory however. Lately, some developers started to throw into their software everything but the kitchen sink.

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Lightweight Debian: LXDE Desktop From Scratch

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In my neck of the woods the Internet doesn’t get any faster, and my six year old dual-core AMD computer still holds up nicely. I don’t like Gnome 3 and I don’t care about Ubuntu’s run everywhere there is lots of memory vision. Linux is all about choice, and I do have plenty of them.

In this series of articles – part 2 here – I’ll take a look at Debian. Debian is one of the oldest Linux distributions still in active development. It is a popular distribution for personal use among software developers. It is also the most popular Linux web server platform. Debian has a great community and the amount of software packaged far exceeds any other Linux disto out there.

As usual I’ll keep an eye on memory. I’ll start with a basic server install, I’ll add X Window followed by LXDE desktop environment. What I am after is a picture like this:

openSUSE 12.3 Desktops Memory (MB)

openSUSE 12.3 Desktops Memory (MB)

The numbers represent the memory consumed by the system immediately after it was started and the user logged in.

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Lightweight openSUSE: LXDE Desktop From Scratch

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openSUSE is a great distribution with a great community. It is well known for its excellent Gnome and KDE support. As such, it is never described as a lightweight distribution.

In the latest versions, openSUSE installation media started to offer support for lighter desktop environments, such as LXDE and XFCE. These environments have almost the same application selection as the Gnome version, under a much lighter memory footprint.

If you are looking for a lightweight distro, this is not the time to give up on openSUSE, especially if this is your favorite OS. Try the LXDE/XFCE environments, as lightness goes they are definitely in the same league with Lubuntu/Xubuntu and Fedora LXDE/XFCE Spins. You can do even better, if you build your own desktop starting from a regular server install and adding only the necessary desktop components.

In this article I will describe how to build a light LXDE desktop on the latest openSUSE 12.3 release. I will start with a server install, and I will go trough the process of adding an X Window server and LXDE desktop environment. It is not difficult, and at the very least, it is an opportunity to learn more about a Linux system.

The same way can be done with any other window manager. The result will be different, as each WM/DE has its own memory footprint.

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Window Mangers/Desktop Environment Blog Clicks

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I think it would be interesting to share with you the click-trough stats for my WM/DE memory articles, as reported by wordpress.com. This is not a poll by any stretch of the imagination.

enlightenment.org 2036
dwm.suckless.org 1557
trinitydesktop.org 1025
joewing.net/projects/jwm/ 893
lxde.org 830
mate-desktop.org 775
awesome.naquadah.org 743
i3wm.org 729
blackboxwm.sourceforge.net 613
nongnu.org/ratpoison 557
incise.org/tinywm.html 530
all-day-breakfast.com/wm2/ 516
openbox.org 474
fluxbox.org 454
cinnamon.linuxmint.com 453
unauthorised.org/dhog/9wm.html 405
icewm.org 387
razor-qt.org 385
xfce.org 311
xmonad.org 269
windowmaker.org 210
fvwm.org 210
sawfish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page 121
kde.org 108
xwinman.org/vtwm.php 106
unity.ubuntu.com 101
miwm.sourceforge.net 99
github.com/GNOME/mutter 90
gnome.org/gnome-3/ 83
afterstep.org 55
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP 44
pekwm.org 43
userbase.kde.org/KWin 34

Last update: May 1, 2014