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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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How to remove Amazon Shopping search result from Unity

Hi there, Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal is out! However the Dash search functionality includes shopping results retrieved from the internet (namely Amazon), which I personally found annoying.

ubuntu

In order to remove that, just run this command:

[bash]
sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
[/bash]

This will remove online shopping search suggestions. Your mile may vary, but from my point of view, it does speed-up search result.

Try it!

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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 convert between sqlite2 and sqlite3 database

Here’s a short guide on how to convert between sqlite2 to sqlite3 database file:

sqlite2 /path/to/mysqlite2.db .dump > backupfile
sqlite3 /path/to/mynewsqlite3.db < backupfile

Using the same method, you can convert sqlite3 db to sqlite2 db too!

p/s: Why you need to convert? because embedded device (read: iPhone and Android) only supports sqlite3 database, while PHP 5 by default supports sqlite2 database.

Thus, this method provide a convenient way to convert between the two different version of sqlite db format.

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