Archive for January, 2006

It has been sometime that I’ve been working with the ecollege project now, and I’ve come to think that I need a meachanism to effectively have a revision history for the project. Previously what i did was to copy the working directory to the backup/revision directory something as the following:

$ cp -r /project/working/directory /project/backup/directory/<date>

It’s not really smart, but I’ve been practising it since I was doing my bachelor degree, and was good enough for assignments that even till now I’m promoting that method for my juniors. Well, at least it’s better for the students than having no versioning system at all where at one time when they screw up with the code they just couldn’t get to the previous working codes. I wonder myself what’s the percentage of university and college students that actually keep snapshots of their works as they are working on it..

Based on reviews and comparisons in the internet, I decided to go with subversion over CVS. Subversion plugin for Eclipse is subclipse and it can be found here. Subversion also has a great online book that have everything to get started, up to the advanced topic. 2 hours after knowing subversion, I’m already good to go with my eclipse + subversion, and here’s subclipse in action on my desktop:

The complete tutorial will be available in my wiki site.

As the Gentoo Linux on Inspiron 6000 series is longer than expected, I’ve created myself a wiki page, and the guide on getting gentoo to work with Inspiron 6000 will be continued there.

The wiki page will hold the more technical side of me, and this blog should balance it with my other sides..

My Inspiron 6000 comes with ATI X300 graphic’s chipset, and some might come with intel graphic’s driver, depending on how do you customize your order.

Starting from Radeon 9200, ATI had closed it’s graphic chipset’s specification, making it hard for linux developers to develop drivers for it. Users with later models will onlly get 2D acceleration using the normal drivers.To get DRI and/or 3D acceleration to work, I’m aware of two options:

1. get the open source driver from r300.sourceforge.net, or
2. use the proprietery driver from ATI itself.

Though naturally I would promote open source, but since the r300 project hasn’t come out with a stable release yet, and installing the proprietary driver with gentoo is a snap, I go for the later option. Gentoo portage system make things really easy when it comes to installing packages;

1. Configure kernel: Kernel configuration need to be as the following

Loadable Module Support --->
[*] Enable loadable module support
[*]   Module unloading
Processor type and features  --->
[*] MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) support
Device Drivers --->
Character Devices --->
<*> /dev/agpgart (AGP Support)
<*> Your_AGP_Chipset_Here
[ ] Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support)

2. Emerge/install the ati-driver

# emerge --sync
# emerge ati-drivers

3. Switch to the ATI OpenGL libraries

# opengl-update ati

4. Configure

fglrxconfig

The fglrxconfig will ask for questions regarding your system, and in the end it’ll produce the /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Here’s my xorg.conf file just in case you couldn’t get yours right.

If thing goes well, we should get "direct rendering: Yes" when running the glxinfo command;

# glxinfo | grep rendering
direct rendering: Yes

Optionally we can test the performance by running glxgears

$ glxgears

Last weekend I managed to try GCC 4 on my Gentoo box. My inspiron 6000 comes with Pentium M, but with gcc version of <3.4, I can only use pentium3 optimisation flag instead of pentium-m, whic is not very nice. My Pentium M 1.86 outperforms Pentium 4 2.8 (ht) by 40% in a test program compiled with pentium3 (my laptop at that time) and the Pentium 4 desktop compiled the same program without cpu optimisation. Later when we tried it with -march pentium3 and -march pentium4 respectively, my Inspiron 6000 + gentoo was just 3%-5% slower than the Pentium 4 2.8 running SuSe That gives the idea that this is not just for fun but might as well give performance benefit at the end. Driven by that, I wish to see if my machine can outperform the much higher clocked Pentium 4 when compiled with gcc 4 and get the pentium-m flag to work.

Methodology:

Currently my gentoo is installed with GCC 3.3.6. With gentoo upgrading the compiler and glibc was easy. First of all, unmask the to be installed gcc and glibc version.

#emerge binutils glibc gcc

#gcc-config -l
[1] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.3.6 *
[2] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.3.6-hardened
[3] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.3.6-hardenednopie
[4] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.3.6-hardenednopiessp
[5] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.3.6-hardenednossp
[6] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4
[7] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4-hardened
[8] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4-hardenednopie
[9] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4-hardenednopiessp
[10] i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4-hardenednossp
[11] i686-pc-linux-gnu-4.0.2

#gcc-config i686-pc-linux-gnu-4.0.2

#emerge -e system && emerge -e world

#gcc-config i686-pc-linux-gnu-3.4.4
#emerge -e system && emerge -e world