GDM (Login Screen) Resolution Too Big to Fit Screen

This black friday I purchased two 19" widescreen samsung 931bw's. I had a problem getting the optimum resolution (1440x900 for one and 2880x900 for two) to work properly in ubuntu.

I had added 1440x900 to the appropriate modelines, which once I when to System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution and changed it from 2880x1000 to 2880x900 it worked fine for my gnome session.

The problem was that the login window was too big. It was still using 2880x1000 for some reason. I found this web page which offered a fix:

GDM (Login Screen) Resolution Too Big to Fit Screen? Try this… « Linux FUD: "Read Ubuntu Forum Post"

To fix it I removed everything from the 24 bit modeline in the screen section except 1440x900, and in all other modelines outside of the screen section. Upon rebooting, the login screen was no longer bigger the than monitor and it worked fine in the session also.

RAID: Growing & Software Vs. Hardware

Growing:

Basically the step includes adding a disc to the array as a spare, then growing the array onto this device.

mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdf1
mdadm --grow /dev/md1 --raid-devices=4

This then took about 3 hours to reshape the array.

The filesystem the needs to be expanded to fill up the new space.

fsck.ext3 /dev/md1
resize2fs /dev/md1

Software Vs. Hardware

An interesting real case experiment of various raid levels, and file system options.

Using RAID 5 with chunk of 128k, and Ext3 with a stride of 16 and block of 4k seems to be the best!
..and something that suprises me is that raid 50 was slower and less cost effective in terms of available storage than Raid 5.

I spent last night reformatting my raid array into RAID 10, then kernel RAID 10 level (rather than a RAID 0 array of RAID 1 arrays), then RAID 50, before going back to RAID 5. There was no real difference in output, and since RAID 5 maximises the storage space, it was an easy decision.

Which indicates that I need a much faster external SCSI box. All the discs are 10k u160 or better. The box is only a SUN UW Box. e.g. u40. I guess the bus is completely saturated!

For anybody who wants to experminent with software RAID in linux, MDADM is really the way to go. It’s just so easy….!

mdadm -v --create /dev/md0 --raid-devices=6 --level=raid5 /dev/sd[abcdef]1

mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0

mount /dev/mdo /mnt/raid

will create, build a filesystem and mount a 6 drive RAID 5 array. I should mention that between steps 1 and 2, you really should wait until the array has finished synchronising and reconstructing itself. Although this point is not essential, it will slow things down. Also MDADM is quite clever, and leaves a drive out as a spare. It constructs the array in degraded mode. That is the array is missing a drive. This speeds things up as there are less drives to saturate the bus.

Linux Software RAID

I recently setup a hardware raid 0. I was interested in setting up a raid 5 array for the redundancy aspect, but hardware raid 5 controllers are too expensive. After reading a few pages, I have decided to setup a linux software-based raid 5 array. I plan to use the following howtos.

The Software-RAID HOWTO

Linux Software RAID

RAID 5 improves on RAID 4 by striping the parity data between all the disks in the RAID set. This avoids the parity disk bottleneck, while maintaining many of the speed features of RAID 0 and the redundancy of RAID 1. Like RAID 4, RAID 5 can survive the loss of a single disk only. RAID 5 is supported by Fedora Linux. Figure 26.2 illustrates the data allocation process in RAID 5. Linux RAID 5 requires a minimum of three disks or partitions.

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Gmail Controlling Junk Mail

This site explains how you can add a plus sign '+' along with a string to your gmail address which will still be delivered to you, but will allow you to filter out that information later on.

For example:

stocks29+test@gmail.com


This will still be delivered to by gmail account, but now I can create a filter based on the To: line of the email. This will allow me to control junk messages that arrive in the inbox from signup sites and also allow me to see who is spamming me.

k9copy

I installed k9copy today, which is a DVD backup program for linux. Using the "Penguin Liberation Foundation" repositories for edgy. It looks like a great easy to use GUI.

I tried it for a quick minute, but got distracted, and when I came back it had crashed. Ill test it out again later.

Re: [Freevo-users] "No action defined for this choice!" error :-(

Re: [Freevo-users] "No action defined for this choice!" error :-(: "Re: [Freevo-users] 'No action defined for this choice!' error :-(

nikosapi
Sun, 23 Jul 2006 07:46:15 -0700
Sorry to bother you all but I found the solution, it was as simple as adding MPLAYER_VERSION = 9999 to my local_conf.py"

Not sure why this fixed the freevo problem, but it did.

Allow nautilus to browse smb: edgy

HOWTO: Enable nautilus integration with beagle - Page 3 - Ubuntu Forums: "That's due to other changes in gnome-vfs. You have to install the libgnomevfs2-bin and libgnomevfs2-extra packages. Then restart nautilus (with a killall nautilus in a terminal)."

This is how to fix the nautilus browsing smb problem.