Tag: linux

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Ubuntu 12.10 Performance Comparison : 64-bit vs 32-bit

It has been known that the X86 64bit architecture outperform 32bit architecture. However, little is known whether 64-bit Ubuntu installation outperforms its 32-bit counterpart significantly as the latter is marked as recommended download from Ubuntu website.

Luckily [Phoronix] had answered these questions for us. In its latest article, [Phoronix] compares the performance between 64-bit Ubuntu installation and 32-bit Ubuntu installation on a Intel Core i5 2520 (4 cores) with 4GB RAM.

Audio File Encoding Performance (less is better)

Server Workload Performance (more is better)

The result concludes that Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit performs better on overall compared to 32-bit, especially on video/audio encoding/decoding tasks. Ubuntu 12.10 also performs better with server workloads.

My thoughts:
Although Canonical still marks Ubuntu 12.10 32-bit as the recommended download. It seems that 64-bit installation offers greater performance even without the advantage of having greater memory. Some might argue that PAE still allows 32-bit Ubuntu to access more than 4GB RAM, PAE access on 32-bit is still significantly slower when compared to 64-bit memory access. Personally, I use Ubuntu 64bit for my development machine as all of my hardware has opensource drivers.

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Compact Grub and Remote Login menu: New features that I love in Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal

Those who are keeping up with the updates knows that Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal has been released yesterday!

However now I’m going to share two great features that I like about Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal.

#1. New GRUB menu that hides old kernel after updates!

Now, GRUB menu always display “Ubuntu” with each kernel update. All previous kernels are grouped together under the “Advanced options for Ubuntu”.

So you get:

Instead of:

This will keep the computer from listing too many kernels on the boot menu, which is messy in itself.

#2. Remote Login option!

Ubuntu Quantal Quetzal allows users to login remotely to Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server right from Ubuntu Greeter.

Other Features worth mentioning

  • Linux kernel 3.5
  • LibreOffice 3.6.1.2, featuring menu that can be integrated to Unity menu.
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How to use SVN (Subversion) on Google Code hosting

Google has generously offered free hosting services for free open source developers to host their projects either by using Mercurial, Subversion or git.

This blog post touches on the basic on to use SVN to maintain source code repository on Google Code Hosting.

Assumptions
This tutorial assume that you have :

  • Created an open source project on Google Code
  • Installed subversion on your GNU/Linux operating system
  • Have source code to import

Initial Import
You must perform initial check-in in order to use the SVN repository. To do that, you must go to your Google Code project, as shown in the screenshot.

subversion svn

From bash terminal, to import your project into Google Code, type:

svn import /path-to/src/ https://your-project-name.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ --username example@gmail.com -m "initial import"

You'll be prompted to enter googlecode.com password, which you can generate from your Google project page

SVN commit
After initial import, your source code will be made available from Google Code hosting for public access.

You may 'commit' after you've made revision or alteration into the source code. to "commit" type:
[bash]
svn commit -m "added new TextField to user-interface"
[/bash]

the -m specifies change log, you shouldn't commit without a proper log message as this will help other users to track the changes that you've made with your source code.

SVN add: For adding new source files
If you add new files to your source code, just type:
[bash]
svn add <filename>
[/bash]

You may then proceed with "svn commit" to add the file to the repository server.

Recursively add unversioned files into SVN repository
If you've added several new files into source code working copy, these file will be unversioned and thus won't be committed to the subversion server.

You can use this command recursively add new unversioned files to svn repository.

[bash]

svn status | perl -ne 's/^\?\s+(\S.+)$/\1/g;chomp;system("svn add \"$_\"");'

[/bash]

**taken from http://www.amiryan.org/2009/04/22/howto-recursively-add-unversioned-files-into-svn-repository/

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Generate EAN,UPC,ISBN barcodes in Ubuntu / Debian Linux

‘barcode‘ is a utility in Debian GNU/Linux distribution used for generating common 1-D barcode: EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC, ISBN, code93, code128 & codabar.
barcode outputs file in postscript format which can be converted to PDF with the ‘ps2pdf‘ utility

Usage:

1. Outputs isbn barcode and converts it to PDF file

$  barcode -o barcode.ps -e isbn
$  ps2pdf barcode.ps

2. Outputs EAN-13 barcode 

$ barcode -o barcode-ean.ps -e ean

If you are looking for a tool that could generate QR Code, then you can try ‘qrencode‘