For the last few days I had my laptop connected to an external monitor which has a 2560×1600 resolution. Whilst having a few websites open and doing a video chat the laptop completely ground to a halt with the fan going full speed.
My laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad X260 with an i7 CPU and 16GB RAM, so not really a lightweight which was why this was so unexpected. After trying some random things I have solved this. So I thought I would detail it here if only so I remember in the future.
After my previous post on testing KDE Plasma on KDE Neon my friend and colleague Max commented with “Any thoughts on using Neon over Kubuntu”.
That did get me thinking as to whether or not Kubuntu with the backports PPA is as good and as stable to use as KDE Neon.
At the beginning of the year I gave KDE Plasma a try as the primary desktop on one of my devices. It wasn’t my primary laptop but I still used it heavily in that time. I enjoyed it but there were still some niggles that meant I wouldn’t have been happy with it being my primary desktop at the time.
A week ago I happened to come across the announcement for KDE Plasma 5.14. The thing that really caught my eye there was the “Display Configuration widget”. This led me to giving KDE & Plasma another chance, another week of testing. Again this is on my primary laptop, a highly-sepecced Lenovo ThinkPad X260.
Gource is a tool which can take a source code tree and create beautiful visualisations out of it. I’ve used it a few times before for various projects. This weekend I spent a little bit of time playing with it and applying it to MairaDB Server to see what it would produce.
The end result can be seen on YouTube.
My go-to Linux distribution when I’m setting up my workstations is Fedora. I have been using it since Fedora Core 1 and RedHat 9 before that. I can’t even remember what RedHat version I started with now. I often try other distributions out and sometimes use them for a few months but I always end up jumping back to Fedora.
Fedora defaults to the Gnome desktop environment so I have used Gnome as my primary desktop environment for many years. Again I’ve tried others such as Cinnamon and XFCE but I always end up back in Gnome. In recent months I’ve heard a lot of good things about KDE Plasma so I thought I would give it a shot for a week. This is a report of my findings.
All software has bugs. Even if you could possibly write the perfect bug free software all the layers down have bugs. Even CPUs as can be seen with the recent Meltdown and Spectre bugs. This means unfortunately sometimes software will crash. When this happens it is useful to capture as much information as possible to try and stop it happening again.
One of the first things I did when coming back to work from the holiday break is code a new crash dump handler to be used in MariaDB ColumnStore. This will spit out a stack trace for the current thread into a file upon a crash. It is very useful for daemons to try and find the root cause of a problem without running through a debugger. Continue reading Coding and decoding crash dump handlers
Sometimes network protocols don’t entirely behave as documented. Other times there is no documentation at all beyond code. Either way you can sometimes find a need to sniff the traffic of a connection to find out what is really going on.
