Donnerstag, 14. Juni 2007

I need a new Laptop

I need a new Laptop. I was thinking about that for months already, but the wish to actually buy one gets bigger and bigger...

Why you ask? Well, the machine itself was fast enough for me when I bought it three years ago. It likely would still be fast enough if I would run CentOS 4 or something similar on it, but with recent Fedora releases the machines feels to slow. It has just 512 MByte of RAM and afaics these days that's not enough to run Gnome, Gnome-terminal, Thunderbird, Firefox and Pidgin in parallel without swapping. In fact there is enough free RAM when I start the machine and those apps freshly, but after some days of use (software suspending it in between) with running OpenOffice.org in between the RAM is filled; so the machine starts swapping and a "yum update" makes everything nearly unusable slow.

Does anybody remember the good old days when Linux needed less hardware resources? Seems that was long long ago...

Sonntag, 3. Juni 2007

Why many comments in config files are bad

Just yum-updated my local home-server from FC6 to F7 (my main machines at home and work used rawhide for weeks already). After such upgrades I always look over the .rpmnew files that got created and merge the changes back from them into the proper config files with meld and delete the rpmnewfiles.

That's no big deal; with a script of of mine I normally would be able to do it in one or two minutes for that machine. I would, if there wasn't dovecot.conf and squid.conf. They have lots of comments in them that explain nearly each of the settings. That just sucks because I now have to look over all of them :-((

Especially dovecot.conf is bad:


[thl@truhe etc]$ diff -u dovecot.conf dovecot.conf.rpmnew | grep '^+' | wc -l
127
[thl@truhe etc]$ diff -u dovecot.conf dovecot.conf.rpmnew | grep '^+' | grep '#' | wc -l
119
[thl@truhe etc]$


Most of those eight non-comment lines are probably settings I actually did.