“*ERROR* pipe is still busy with an old pageflip”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I’ve been hitting an occasional display freeze that matches this
description <http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7675146.html>. Looks
like a known problem with the 3.16 kernel. I thought things had got
better with a system update I did 11 days ago, but this afternoon the
freeze recurred.
Unlike the previous times, killing all my user processes succeeded in
unfreezing the display, so I was able to log in again without rebooting.
5 years
New Multi-Core Raspberry Pi 2 Launches
by Peter Reutemann
'Coming in at the same $35 price-point that has come to be expected
from the Raspberry Pi, it looks like the new Model 2 will be packing a
quad-core ARM processor with a GB of RAM. From the article: "The
Raspberry Pi Foundation is likely to provoke a global geekgasm today
with the surprise release of the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B: a
turbocharged version of the B+ boasting a new Broadcom BCM2836 900MHz
quad-core system-on-chip with 1GB of RAM – all of which will drive
performance "at least 6x" that of the B+."'
-- source: http://build.slashdot.org/story/15/02/02/0134211
And also in the news:
"Microsoft Announces Windows For Raspberry Pi 2
Microsoft is expanding their Windows Developer Program for Internet of
Things by delivering a version of Windows 10 that runs on the
Raspberry Pi 2. This release of Windows 10 will be free for the maker
community through the Windows Developer Program for IoT. With an
official partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Microsoft is
bringing development tools, services and ecosystem to the Raspberry Pi
community. More details will be shared in the coming months. You can
already join the program and be amongst the first to receive product
information and beta software releases."
-- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/02/02/1326225
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
5 years, 1 month
Hard Drive Failure Rates
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
BackBlaze have been frequently posting notes on their experience with
running large numbers of hard drives in their storage service. Some
salient points:
* “Enterprise” drives, while more expensive than “consumer” ones, are
not significantly more reliable. (This has been borne out by other
studies.)
* Keep your drives running all the time, or switch them off when not in
use? “Our vote is to keep them running.”
* They do use SMART to keep an eye on their drives. Other studies I
read reported that these only picked up a minority (around 30%) of
failures, from which I concluded that SMART was not worth using. I
suppose it’s different for these guys if it saves on costs to replace
a drive *before* it actually starts reporting uncorrectable errors...
<https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-faq/>
5 years, 1 month
Debian 8 Jessie Released
by Peter Reutemann
"After almost 24 months of constant development, the Debian project is
proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name Jessie), which
will be supported for the next five years thanks to the combined work
of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.
(Release notes.) Jessie ships with a new default init system, systemd.
The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times, cgroups
for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services.
The sysvinit init system is still available in Jessie. Screenshots and
ascreencast are available."
-- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/04/26/0322241
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
5 years, 1 month
The March Of (In)Security
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Bruce Schneier has said “Today's top-secret programs become tomorrow's
PhD theses and the next day's hacker tools”. And not long after that, a
graduate homework assignment.
The NSA was desperate to prevent any exposure of its top-secret
“QUANTUM” packet-injection technology. But all this effort was futile,
because others had already invented the same thing, including China’s
“Great Cannon”, which was used to attack GitHub recently.
The only protection is end-to-end encryption.
<https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/the_further_dem.html>
5 years, 1 month
X2Go: An Open Source Remote Desktop Solution For Linux
by Peter Reutemann
"X2Go is an Open Source remote desktop application for GNU/Linux that
uses NX technology protocol. The main difference between X2Go and
other remote desktop applications is it provides secure standalone
remote desktop sessions via SSH. So, each session connected using X2Go
is strongly encrypted and safe. X2Go allows you mainly to connect to
Linux systems from Linux, Windows, or Mac OS systems. Also, many
clients can simultaneously connect and use single X2Go server. It
comes with two components, namely X2Go server and X2Go client. X2Go
server is a system that is being accessed from a client system. And,
the X2Go is a system which can be used to access the X2Go server. This
Client will be able to connect to X2Go server(s) and start, stop,
resume and terminate (running) desktop sessions. X2Go Client stores
different server connections and may automatically request
authentication data from LDAP directories. Furthermore it can be used
as fullscreen loginscreen (replacement for loginmanager like xdm)."
-- source: http://www.unixmen.com/x2go-an-open-source-remote-desktop-solution-for-li...
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
5 years, 1 month
