Tag: operating systems

Red Hat Magazine says “Open source is inevitable“.

After years of fierce competition, Microsoft and Sun have decided to settle lawsuits and set aside their differences. Why? The answer won’t surprise those who know Linux and open source. Today the customer is in charge. See what happened, how history and the open source movement has helped bring us to where we are today, and why open source is inevitable because it allows the customer to take control.

They also have a nice video clip attached (in QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Ogg Theora downloads or RealPlayer stream).

Apparently, it is possible to search for packages with apt. Here is it works:

apt-cache search mplayer

Masks are also supported. Consider the difference (package descriptions were removed for cleaner output):

[leonid@ltsp ~]$ apt-cache search lad
glade2
intltool
libglade
libglade
libglade2
libglade2-devel
pygtk2-libglade
qt-designer
Gtk-Perl
ladspa
ladspa-devel
mplayer
xine-lib

[leonid@ltsp ~]$ apt-cache search '^lad'
ladspa
ladspa-devel

My new office workstation was behaving very strangely. Once in a while it would slow down to a crawl and hang doing something. I checked the processlist, but nothing was going wrong. I disabled all the services. I checked my scheduled tasks. Nothing. I left it with top running, but it showed that 100% of CPU was idle and more than 500 MBytes of RAM was free. Nothing was eating up resources. Neither was there any significant network traffic. The machine wasn’t swapping or anything. Non-the-less the load average would go up as high as 4.0 or even 7.0!

Continue reading Timer fix