Little Tidbits
I had an hour to wait before the football was on television, so I had to find a time filler. Out of the two time waster options I had, playing around with linux was by far the more moral option.
In this time I managed to put two demons to rest: the niggling thought that linux is slow, and the niggling nuisance of not having my mouse's side buttons working.
My extremely unscientific speed benchmark of Linux and Windows XP consisted of timing how long they take to start up, and also timing the startup times of Open Office Writer and Mozilla Firefox. I compared similar versions of Open Office, and Firefox 1.5 (as installed myself, with some frustration).
The results? Windows XP took 26 seconds to load from the boot menu, Open Office opened in 10 seconds, and Firefox 2 seconds. In comparison, Ubuntu loaded in 53 seconds, with an additional 18 seconds to load the gui after the login page, making a startup time of 1 minute 11 seconds. Open Office opened in 10 seconds, and Firefox 4 seconds. So there we go, Linux isn't slow when you use it, only when you wait to use it.
The slow start up time strikes me as quite important. Time spent waiting is less time spent computing. And even worse for dual booters, it discourages us from loading Linux at all if we can get the job done quicker with windows. Some may argue that the longer startup times for Ubuntu ensure a safer, error free startup. For me however, I have only experienced startup troubles with Ubuntu (having lost my wireless card 3 times now).
Now with that thoroughly unexciting spiel out of the way, onto the mouse buttons.
Windows XP thoroughly trounces Linux in this area. Simply put, it works straight away in Windows. No hassles. In contrast, to get these buttons working in Ubuntu, I had to google for 10 minutes, install software from the internet, edit/create/backup 4 different text files, and reboot my computer. Actually following these instructions was fairly straight forward (yet time consuming), so it makes me wonder - if it's just a matter of editing text files to get the buttons working, why can't it be set that way by default!!
posted by Chris at 6:51 PM
6 Comments:
Just saw the link to your blog in a slashdot comment. Thought I would say hello as I am an Adelaidean too (I am from Brompton(near the Nth Adelaide Pool)).
Greets from a local linux user. I use Mandriva and haven't tried Ubuntu. Mandrake/iva has always worked for me and i can assure you that your startup times are a bit longer than mine.
Here's a read you may enjoy.
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1739
DigitalSpy
PS: Turn comment word verification on if you don't want your readers to get lost underneath all those penis enlargements and cialis advertisements.
8:28 AM
Thanks for the tips re word verification.
And it's always great to meet a fellow South Aussie! I'm just a bit further down Port Road in the West Lakes area.
Just on slow booting, last night when I was playing around I discovered that Ubuntu defaults my laptop to 800MHz even when i'm plugged into the wall. When I jacked up the clock to 1.73GHz manually, I was able to load Open Office in around 7 seconds, and Firefox around 3 seconds. I wish I knew how to set this thing to always run at fullspeed when not running on the battery!
Although I suspect that my OS slow booting problem is because a gazillion thingies are being done at startup. So obviously I need fewer thingies.
12:54 PM
I know very little about notebooks and linux but I would assume that the speed thing can be turned off in the BIOS somewhere.
4:42 PM
Re. the CPU running at halfspeed, check to see whether 'cpuspeed' is running. Ideally, it should be running in adaptive mode and crank up the CPU speed when necessary, reducing performance for CPU-bound tasks by only a fraction of a second at the start, but it's possible this isn't working for you, on your hardware, and with your distro.
9:30 PM
According to a taskbar applet, when i'm under load my computer cranks up to 1.73GHz, so this clock scaling feature is working. What annoys me though is that it's designed for the purpose of saving battery power, so why should I be forced to have my clockspeed halved when i'm plugged into the wall! It wouldn't matter if it scaled when I needed it to, but it doesn't. For instance, when I load a big image in the Gimp, or when I load Firefox. I've basically paid premium dollar for a system that does every day tasks as fast as my 5 year old Athlon PC.
I found some info on how to manually change the clockspeed via the command line, but it's really quite useless. Typing commands in a command line is much more annoying than Firefox loading in 4 seconds instead of 2. And as i've said all along, i'm a newbie - I shouldn't HAVE to be in the command line.
2:12 PM
You can edit your /etc/cpuspeed.conf to set this up. Specifically, you'll need to check out the ac_powered_* profiles. It sounds like Ubuntu, for some reason, doesn't modify these. Another option is to stop the cpuspeed daemon when you're wired up. When stopped, your processor will run at full speed.
12:59 AM
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