Anyone using Ubuntu/Linux?

Joolz wrote:Likewise, my daughter wants web, msn messenger, email and an office package for homework. Up until last week, she ran XP Pro but after 8 months of running, XP was grinding to a halt. I ran Malwarebytes and CCleaner across it, put JKDefrag on and cleaned the disk and registry up but it still sucked horribly. Monday, I put Ubuntu Jaunty on and it goes like a rocket. Pidgin, Thunderbird and OpenOffice do everything she needs and now my other half is looking at it for her laptop but hers is trickier as her MP3 player software is Windows only (might work in Wine).

I've been running XP for 8 years on my current machine and it's still fast. You have to know how the OS works in order to get greatest efficiency out of it. you should regulartly run Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter, for example, and be aware of the fact that most programs will try to run programs/services constantly in the background when they are installed. These can easily be switched off too.

I am so confidant with my abilities/knowledge that I don't even run an anti-virus sofware on my machine. I haven't had any infection/problems for a long time.

Chucky wrote:

Joolz wrote:Likewise, my daughter wants web, msn messenger, email and an office package for homework. Up until last week, she ran XP Pro but after 8 months of running, XP was grinding to a halt. I ran Malwarebytes and CCleaner across it, put JKDefrag on and cleaned the disk and registry up but it still sucked horribly. Monday, I put Ubuntu Jaunty on and it goes like a rocket. Pidgin, Thunderbird and OpenOffice do everything she needs and now my other half is looking at it for her laptop but hers is trickier as her MP3 player software is Windows only (might work in Wine).

I've been running XP for 8 years on my current machine and it's still fast. You have to know how the OS works in order to get greatest efficiency out of it. you should regulartly run Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter, for example, and be aware of the fact that most programs will try to run programs/services constantly in the background when they are installed. These can easily be switched off too.

I am so confidant with my abilities/knowledge that I don't even run an anti-virus sofware on my machine. I haven't had any infection/problems for a long time.

JKdefrag is a kind of defragger with knobs on. It defrags the files, then rearranges the data to the centre area of the disk platters so the arm only has to move across the smallest possible area. It still uses the windows defrag API but makes better use of it. Scandisk turned no errors and most of the performance hit almost certainly comes from the Anti Virus, anti spyware and rootkit packages we run. As the PC is used by a 13 year old I'm not willing to turn them off. I stopped short of a firewall as I have the router has one and I've blocked all outgoing access other than standard ports. I run my own local mail server which has anti virus a local proxy with integrated web filter incorporating AV.

Funnily enough, at the moment, I'm working on a P4 with 2GB of RAM that crawls. Takes ages to boot and the disk access is constant. So far I've defragged, chkdsk'd, run a reg cleaner and hi-jack this, malwarebytes, ccleaner, cleaned out the temp files and all and it's still crawling. Even defragged the pagefile but it still runs like a dog. The process manager shows 97% free system resources so christ knows where it's all going. I ran IPTraf to monitor outgoing connections but there's nothing unusual.

Have you scanned your machine to see if it's carrying anything? Even if you're sure, a blast with malwarebytes would still be a good idea to be on the safe side.

I regularly run ccleaner to make sure that there are no foreign programs on my machine. Regarding your own machine, what's the capacity and usage of the hard-disk itself? When it approaches capacity, performance is severely lessened. Other than that, it could just be a hardware fault somewhere... ...?

I've run memtest across it and it checks out OK and thrashed the CPU for a while using the tools on UBCD. I'm starting to wonder if there's something running that's hidden from the process list. If there is something there, you'd expect a rootkit to be hiding it but there's no positive on that either. Disk is 120 GB with about 50% free.

It's about 5 years old and I think the owners going to let me put in a new mobo, core 2 duo, 4 GB of RAM with PAE enabled cos it's only 32 bit XP and a 320GB SATA disk. If I'm going to all that trouble, I'll probably install from scratch.

I was just going to suggest that: Why don't you just boot from the Windows XP CD to enter the set-up area, and then reinstall the whole OS? Before doing that, you also have the option to format the disk. When was the last time something like that has been done? I know that over time thigns such as 'bad clusters' appear on the disk and they drag down performance.

I think that's definitely the way to go. That is one way that Linux does win out though. All the user's home directories and program settings are set up on a separate partition. As long as you don't format the home partition, all the bookmarks and program settings are retained even after a re-install.

Partitions? - My experiences with them have been quite bad. I think it's just a messy way to go and isn't good for the processor. However, did you know that you can run Windows and UNIX on the same machine? You'd have to use a partition as both use different file systems, but it's possible (and messy!).

Hi Chucky,

I must admit, I dual boot XP on my laptop but only because I have an ELM interface for hooking into the diagnostic interface on cars and I can't get it running any other way. Paid itself off in saved garage costs in no time

On the Linux side, you're actually encouraged to partition disks according to whatever application you have in mind for the machine. At work I have a mail server where the mail store and database backends are kept on XFS formatted partitions. With XFS, you can dump the entire filesystem or freeze it and take snapshots you can then backup. This way, you avoid problems with file changes during backup so you don't have to stop the servers.

Funky stuff.

j

Which machines does your work use?; and what d you make of the overall set-up? I used to work in the council for 8 summers in a row and was appalled at how their networks were set-up. Like, it was as if they threw 1000s of computers into a room and then hooked them up at random, hoping that they'd then all work.

Kevin

Chucky wrote:Which machines does your work use?; and what d you make of the overall set-up? I used to work in the council for 8 summers in a row and was appalled at how their networks were set-up. Like, it was as if they threw 1000s of computers into a room and then hooked them up at random, hoping that they'd then all work.

Kevin

LOL, Sounds like many of the server rooms I've walked into

I've got a 42U rack and a pile of Supermicro dual Xeon servers bought from a bankrupt company. Hold on, I'm about to go geek

I have two servers running OpenLDAP to provide authentication with redundancy. One runs DHCP with the second one configured to take over if it fails. The network itself is subnetted into 4 ranges. The subnets are joined using a low spec server with 4 Gigabit NICs and a routing table from hell . There's one PDC running Samba and several Samba BDCs each with DNS for a subnet. Windows goes for the BDC first to lighten the PDCs workload so it's hardly ever stressed. Users home directories are on a home brewed NAS using server grade hardware and additional data storage on a second home brewed NAS giving us 6 TB of storage in total. Most of the servers (and the NAS's) are multi-homed with 4 NICs, giving them all a presence on all four subnets. I have a centralised print server and a backup system with 6TB of onboard storage and another 6TB in a seperate building onto which backups are mirrored. There's a web server, mail server, a caching proxy with on-board content filtering and I'm looking at failover for the web and mail. We also have a server running Clonezilla that stores a disk image of all the different types of PCs. We can PXE boot and re-install any machine in the building. There's a UPS for every two servers so we can handle 15 minutes of power down before things start shutting down.

All the servers run CentOS Linux except the central router (Ubuntu 8.04LTS) and a Windows 2003 server that runs software that the council require us to run to hook into their admin system. Client side, there's 400 PCs running XP Pro and 10 Macs. We use mandatory profiles which are just under 4 MB and during morning logon the desktops go from hitting enter to loaded desktop in 6-7 seconds.

This may seem like a lot of effort but our annual budget wouldn't even buy a new Porsche Boxter and has led to some "creative" thinking. The fastest switch we have is Gigabit and none are managed so we try to keep data on it's own subnet so only internet bound traffic gets routed. The whole lot's on copper but clever routing and multihoming everything has let us squeeze every ounce out of what we have. And this I fear is why so many organisations end up in the mess you described earlier. They just throw money at things. If it seems slow, throw another server here, another Cisco box there, contract it out so the person who fits it doesn't know the bigger picture and probably doesn't care.

If we do have a weakpoint, I think it's that the desktops are aging and we don't have enough wi-fi access points but with a bit of luck we'll have cash to start replacing this year.