Josh Saddler

Decided I'd shake things up a bit this month, after keeping the same look for nearly three straight months. Thus, I present:

icons: Area o.43
gtk+: Rele (Rezlooks engine)
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk (yes, it is confusingly named)
background: rassilon

It's grungy, but rather sleek. Surprisingly easy on the eyes, too. The lighter elements of the Rele gtk+ theme aren't overpoweringly white, but are just light enough to provide a decent contrast to the generally darker Area icons.

There's also an uncluttered version here.

I've been looking to assemble themes that are grungy, and themes that are warmer-yet-wintry. I like winter. I still have some hope that these 80 degree weeks will come to an end soon. We're almost to the middle of November. Surely we'll see gray sky, cool breezes, and maybe even rain here in SoCal at some point, right? Right? Well, if not, I can at least put it on my desktop.

Even though I'm currently sick with H1N1, also known as swine flu, this morning I was feeling well enough to write an ebuild for an interesting media app I found: Tabu Audio Player. It's an interesting player -- while it still needs some translation work into English, it's simple and has an appealing UI drawn by Cairo.

It had only a single configure option, "debug," and a very short list of dependencies, so I figured it'd be a simple ebuild to write, right?

Wrong! Turns out that after a half-hours' worth of poking at configure.ac, the package's check for --disable-debug/--enable-debug was completely broken. If you explicitly passed --disable-debug, like "-debug" in IUSE, then it would enable the debug build every time. Thanks to rej and a3li on IRC for nailing this problem down; they were really helpful.

a3li also shared his solution for the same problem in one of his packages, so I used it in my ebuild to ensure that "debug" works properly as a USE variable.

Meanwhile, I sent a bug report to upstream asking for a smarter debug check. I also asked for CFLAGS="-02" to be removed from Makefile.am, that way folks are free to use their own -O levels without having to resort to using sed on the Makefile, as I had to in the ebuild.

Speaking of which: I have an ebuild for Tabu 2.1 waiting for you in my devspace, if you'd like to try it out.

Last night I installed UT2004 on my laptop, after not playing it since June. The laptop in question is an older ThinkPad R61i, with an Intel X3100 graphics chip. I know -- not the best for gaming. However, most online reports I found indicate that it's acceptable for such an old game as UT2004, so I figured it'd be worth a shot. The Intel graphics drivers have made a lot of progress in the last two years, especially on the 3D front, right? Right?

Kinda. After reducing all settings to "low" and dialing back the resolution to 1024x768 (native is 1280x800), the game is playable, but with very uneven framerates. Looking toward the middle of a map, or anyplace with a lot of action, introduces a good stutterfest; frames are down to between 8 and 18FPS. I enabled a few extra options such as pixel shaders and VBOs in UT2004.ini to add a bit more performance, but it's still marginal.

I'm rather disappointed. I'm not having nearly as great an experience as other Linux users, and certainly not as good as the Windows gamers who've benchmarked Unreal on this hardware. However, I did also catch the huge xorg-server 1.7 update as well, so maybe there have been some performance regressions since 1.6. It makes it a little hard to determine the areas that could use tweaking. I don't have anything special in my xorg.conf, just a default resolution. It's possible there's a setting I'm missing.

I'd like to try UT2004 on my desktop workstation, which has a RadeonHD 4550 card, but all reports indicate that even the latest git checkouts of the open-source drivers still don't work with Unreal. Apparently the game can't even launch, much less run at playable speeds. But as rapidly as the drivers are maturing, I'm hoping this'll be fixed in a month or so. Call me optimistic.

* * *

It looks like Abiword 2.8.0 was released today, so I wrote an ebuild and made it available in my devspace. I've been hand-writing these things for awhile. It took quite a bit of research to determine what went into the 2.7 betas, and now I'll have to do another overhaul of the 2.8 ebuild to account for the new plugin system. There's no longer a separate abiword-plugins package; they're all distributed in the base 2.8.0 archive. This means there will be a lot more tricky configure checks and USE flags, which sucks from a flexibility standpoint. Keeping the plugins in an external package was much simpler, so I'm a bit disappointed by this upstream decision.

Still, right now you can download and install Abiword 2.8.0 using my ebuild. While it needs a few cleanups, it will get you set up with a fully functioning basic Abiword install, though the only available plugin (as shown in the "Plugins" dialog) is .odt support.

This new version launches much quicker than 2.7.10, and it seems to have fixed all the rendering errors and even the crashes that happened with basic operations. Basically, you can click stuff now without worrying.

Cleaning up my ebuild is a long task, thanks to those darned plugins. Patches welcome, or I suppose you could always just wait and see what ends up in Bugzilla.

Gosh, just look at all the buzzwords in the title!

As you may have guessed, I'll be talking a bit about the recent developments on the FOSS drivers for RadeonHD cards, specifically for R700 cards. And some other hardware stuff.

Radeon

Yesterday, October 3, I made some big ol' changes to my workstation.

I decided to try out the new video driver stack that all the kids have been talking about. Kernel Mode Setting, git Mesa/xf86-video-ati/libdrm, git kernel 2.6.32_rc1-git3. All that jazz. I wanted to see if the 3D and KMS features were really working on my RadeonHD 4550 or not. I normally run a stable graphics stack, with ~arch Mesa/x86-video-ati/libdrm where necessary to keep up on 2D acceleration and features.

This was a big leap for me. So I first consulted some of the X11 team members, remi and nirbheek, who were quite helpful. I installed the latest git-sources kernel, which at the time was 2.6.32_rc1-git3. Mike Pagano has since added -git5. Next, I downloaded the individual -9999 ebuilds for the git master packages from the X11 overlay, stuck 'em in my local overlay, and merged 'em. Only thing left to do was reboot.

Lemme tell ya -- KMS in action is awesome. The console output is just beautiful, and there's no more flickering when SLiM and Xfce load.

I did notice some minor graphical corruption of the default mouse pointer. However, the corruption isn't present when using any pointer but the default "arrow", and it also isn't seen when hovering inside a Firefox window. I was told this is because Firefox uses its own cursors. Anyway, I reported the bug upstream.

Disclaimer: I know glxgears isn't a benchmark. But folks always want to know its results anyway. I tried running glxgears, which gave me a result of over 1300FPS with desktop compositing activated. My window manager is xfwm4, so all compositing is via Xrender, not OpenGL. Disabling compositing resulted in a 500FPS boost to over 1800FPS. What's this mean? Who knows. Probably nothing. Moving on.

I took the advice of my fellow developers on IRC and installed quake3-demo. Couldn't run it, though. It blanked the screen, then a message from my LCD firmware appeared, some kind of "input not supported" or "input not detected" error. It slowly repeated the window, drawiing it from center to the top right. I had to Ctrl-Alt-Bksp to get to the console. It also locked up SLiM in the background, pegging one of my CPU cores at 100%. At this point, I rebooted just to test that KMS was still working, then called it a night.

Today, I revisited my pointer corruption bug tried the workarounds posted by Alex Deucher. To my surprise, each one worked! Booting with radeon.modeset=0 removes the glitch, though it makes each boot extremely ugly, of course. Specifying EXANoDownloadFromScreen "true" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf also fixes the corrupted pointer, though it may also be slowing down all screen drawing operations by the tiniest bit. The jury's still out on that one; it may just be my imagination. I decided to keep this second fix, as KMS is just too glorious to throw out. I like pretty boots.

I also revisited quake3-demo, since I found some pointers on the Phoronix forums that had a workaround, which is to run OpenGL applications prefixed by LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1. To my surprise, this worked nicely. I tested resolution has high as 900-something by 720. My screen is 1440x900, but I haven't felt like pushing it that far, yet. The game is fluid and playable. I need to figure out how to display FPS so I can properly record what I'm seeing.

With the success of Q3demo, I remembered that QuakeLive has recently added Linux support. I installed the add-on for Firefox and tried it out. Works nicely, though I'm also running Firefox with LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 just to be sure. As Alex Deucher and John Bridgman have pointed out on the Phoronix forums, that variable really isn't the safest thing to do, since if something crashes it can take down the whole X server, not just the application. However, it's also the only way I get working 3D games.

QuakeLive is pretty playable, though the framerates in a few places aren't smooth -- I can't tell if this is because of my card's capabilities, or the driver stack, or the whole weird idea of playing a 3D first-person shooter inside a web browser. The big problem with QuakeLive is that the sound is terribly distorted: the voices are greatly drawn-out and slowed down, like playing an old tape recorder at 1/4 speed. There are some solutions on the QL forums, but they're mainly for Ubuntu/Pulseaudio users. I haven't found anything that works for me, yet. The effects and music are okay; it's just the voices that lag horribly.

I've also installed the latest Nexuiz, version 2.5.2, in anticipation of future testing. One of these days I'll reinstall UT2004, but I haven't read any succesful reports of that game on R700 cards. There's a lot of testing to do in the future!

Overall, I'm thrilled with the new driver hotness for my ATI card. I bought it specifically because I knew the 2D support at the time was excellent, and because there would be so many good things coming down the way for other features, including 3D acceleration. (Yes, just like the latest XKCD strip. I swear, it's like that guy listens to everything I say and watches everything I do. It's really spooky!)

Hats off to all the developers for making it happen. Many thanks!

SSD

After August's fiasco with a defective SSD, I decided to use my refund from the RMA and order a different SSD a few days ago. This time I've settled on a SanDisk enterprise SSD from an HP blade server. Only cost $49, no shipping charges. Brand new. eBay for the win.

It packs 16GB of SLC flash, which makes it perfect for mounting /usr/portage and /var on it. This way I can feel free to sync whenever I want, instead of only once a week or more. My system drive uses MLC flash, so I've been trying to ease the write load on it, which means putting the high-write activity on a dedicated disk.

The SanDisk SSD "only" has sustained reads/writes at 60MB/sec, but that's plenty for syncing Portage, as the real limiter is not how fast data can be dumped to the disk, but how fast the rsync servers can send it to my box. Same for /var writes -- it's mostly just log files and some tiny temp things, as /var/tmp is already mounted on a RAMdisk. No large files that need >100MB/sec bandwidth. I'm lookin' forward to shovin' it in my box!

More hardware

Since September 28 was my birthday and all, I've been treating myself to various bits of cheap hardware. Like a replacement AC adapter for my DC PicoPSU. The current AC brick is rated at 102W, which is way more than I need, but the problem is that it spins up its tiny fan at only 50%-75% load. This means that opening up a bunch of tabs, compiling packages, playing Quake, watching large-sized Hulu videos and whatnot turns on the fan right away. And it's the world's most annoying fan. It's loud, whiny, it hisses, and it blows the bad smell of very hot electronics out into the room. Lemme tell you, hot plastic and PSU guts do not smell good.

I just ordered a replacement fanless adapter. This thing is high-quality, designed to run very cool. And it's rated at 150W output, meaning it can match my 150W PicoPSU. My max system draw is maybe 60W, but I'll have overhead room in case I ever feel like upgrading a key component somewhere.

I also bought a $40 wireless router, an Asus WL-520gU. I already have a WL-500gP v2, which I hacked and flashed with DD-WRT a long time ago. This new router is so that I can hook up my Xbox 360 to the network without having to run 50 feet of cable across the carpet. I chose the 520gU instead of the gC because the gU supports Xlink Kai, which seems prett cool to me, as I don't have a Gold Live account. Yay for tricky internets. Apparently it's pretty common to buy a cheap wireless router and put it into client mode, rather than buying the $100 official USB dongle . . . which doesn't even support WPA2-AES or any decent security. Asus routers are known for excellent open-source support, and I've had nary a complaint about my current one. Yay for Linux on routers! Yay for online gaming!

* * *

Oh yes, and before I forget, this month's Xfce desktop:

It's October, but my current desktop is so pretty (gallery link) I haven't felt the need to switch for the last couple of weeks. There's another clean version that just shows off the wallpaper in my devspace.

So, a couple days in, and I'm still trying to (re)install Gentoo. More on that in a bit. First, let's talk about speed.

It's hard to tell whether or not my new SSDs are really a speedy improvement over the old software RAID1 array of magnetic HDDs. Normally, a bare-bones commandline system feels much faster than an aging graphical desktop, even on the same hardware.

I notice that compile times are slightly faster, though I've also been using tmpfs for Portage and the usual tmp file locations, so putting it all on RAM will lead to a significant speedup anyway.

Boot times are indeed quite zippy; the longest wait is for my media HDD to finish mounting -- it's on ReiserFS, which is known to have very slow mounts.

Now, let's talk filesystems.

The critical showstopper that's made me reinstall two times (and counting) is ext4. So far, ext4 has completely corrupted a whole drive (/var and /usr/portage) and made the other drive (/ and /boot) almost unbootable.

ext4 has eaten my data, hosed my system, and ruined my life.

No amount of fscking has fixed /var and /usr/portage, both on the second SSD. Did you know that you shouldn't let fsck try to resize broken inodes? apparently the resize behavior is known to be broken in the latest versions. It's known to corrupt filesystems. I didn't know that, either. I'm sorry, but what part of "production-ready" applies to ext4? Yeah, it's a new kid on the block, but it's moved out of the "experimental" status into the kernel.

That does not make it ready for your system. The first and second Gentoo installs largely didn't work because (I think) there might have been an invalid mount option. Or something could not be found. Or a superblock was missing. Or the moon was wrong. #$#^#&@ shitty unintelligible error messages. (Here's a tip, developers: don't put every possible thing that could have gone wrong into an error message, then repeat that message for every different error.)

My mount options seemed to be good after double-checking the manpage and around the internet, including kernel.org. Here was my original fstab, from when I had only one partition for / (no separate /boot):

/dev/sda1  /     ext4  noatime,data=writeback,commit=60,nobarrier  0 1
/dev/sdb1  /var  ext4  noatime,data=writeback,commit=60,nobarrier  0 1
/dev/sdb2  /usr/portage  ext4  noatime,data=writeback,commit=60,nobarrier 0 1

Livin' on the edge here. I figured I wouldn't need a separate /boot partition on my first drive, so I lumped it all into one. I did that back in 2005 and 2006 with no problems, right? Right. The rest of the options were designed to maximize SSD performance.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get the system to boot. Made it past grub, the kernel loaded, but when it came time to mount /, it couldn't mount the filesystem rw. No amount of changing options worked -- adding rw to grub.conf, to the fstab options, nothing.

So I figured it must be my one-partition setup, and wiped my disks. Reinstalled again, this time adding a /boot partition on sda. Same ext4 options for /boot as for the other partitions. Rebooted and . . . nope, same errors. Now I'm also seeing a message about a possible bad option or other variable, which I can only assume was in fstab, thanks to the aforementioned shitty nonspecific error messages.

Hit up Google. Not much help. I again backed off on some of the ext4 options, tried playing with Grub parameters, but got the same results. The filesystems mostly weren't mounting, and when a few of them did, it was all readonly.

Sigh. Time to reinstall again. Set up a similar fstab, but this time I changed an ext4 option for /boot to data=ordered, based on this blog post. Reboot and . . . hey, it works. /boot gets mounted. Nothing else does, but it's a start.

I quickly booted back into the LiveCD, changed the other fstab entries to data=ordered, and reboot again. This time, the system seems to boot just fine . . . until it tries to mount /var and /usr/portage from the second SSD. *bzzt*, these cannot be mounted! Something's gone wrong. One more reboot, just for luck, then . . . *bzzt*, now there are filesystem errors! Fsck wants to fix them, so I let it run. Except it completely hoses both partitions. They seem to be so badly scrambled that even running mkfs.ext4 on them from the liveCD results in errors, some of which seem to be emitted from the libata system, which makes me wonder if now the SSD itself has also been corrupted.

I'll have to completely reinitialize and repartition that disk, now. Thanks, ext4. Thanks for hosing my data. Up yours, ext4.

I'm done trying to figure out why ext4 doesn't work. I don't care that it's supposed to be a fast file system for SSDs. I don't care that it's 40 times faster than ReiserFS to mount at bootup. I don't care. ext4 has lost my data three times now. I think my fingers are sufficiently burned to know that "the oven is hot; don't touch."

Up yours, ext4. I'm going back to ReiserFS. At least it works. It's never failed me in more than four years.

---

Update: On top of the initial ext4 errors, fsck problems, and mount issues, the Mobi drive was also going bad. Now the motherboard BIOS can't see it, regardless of which SATA port or cable I plug in. So just a day or so after trying out the device, when it was initially working for the first install (though the filesystem was throwing ext4 errors, at least /var and /usr/portage worked okay), and it finally finished failing. F***. I contacted the seller to request an RMA; I have a feeling that I'll end up having to go through the manufacturer, which will take a long time. Meanwhile, I'm without a workstation for an indefinite time, so I've set my devaway on dev.gentoo.org. I did find a couple other reports on the internets that say that their Mobis also died shortly after they arrived, so maybe there was a batch of bad drives.

But don't get me wrong, the Mobi drive dying doesn't absolve ext4 of any guilt. The ext4 filesystem still completely f**ked itself repeatedly on the system drive, the UltraDrive ME. It still refuses to do what it's told to do. But rather than continue to investigate related LaunchPad bugs on mounting ext4 rw and fsck errors, I'm going to move back to ReiserFS for the UltraDrive, and just live with longer boots. The RMA process will take awhile, so I may have to reinstall everything on a single drive and just avoid syncing Portage for awhile.

On a good note, OCZ (the company that makes the Vertex, an identical drive with an Indilinx controller), has been experimenting with a homegrown beta firmware that lets the drive do online garbage collection in the background. This is important for keeping the performance of the drive as fresh as when it was first used, even after it gets filled up with files and repeated (re)writes. The firmware is still in testing, but I'm hopeful that it'll make it out the door soon. Hopefully the same firmware features will find their way to my Super Talent drive -- and hopefully the TRIM command will also be implemented in the firmware.

Of course, the only Linux filesystem I know of that supports TRIM is ext4 . . .

So, in between being super busy with Gentoo yet not having enough time to keep up with all the bugs, document updates, and project commitments . . . I've added yet another item to my plate: a fresh install of Gentoo onto a pair of SSDs.

I've never reinstalled Gentoo on this workstation; this is the original install from October 2006. I had thought about just finding some stage4/stage5 backup scripts and tips from the Gentoo Forums, but it seems to be more cumbersome and time-consuming than reinstalling. Besides, installing Gentoo from scratch gives me a chance to create an even more lean, minimal system. No more accumulated packages and cruft that I don't use, just the essentials.

And it'll let me see how good these SSDs really are for compilation times.

I purchased two: a 32GB Super Talent UltraDrive ME for /, and a 16GB Mobi 3000 for /var and /usr/portage.

The Super Talent is a new-generation MLC drive with an Indilinx controller. It's not as good in some areas as Intel's controller for the X-25, but it's better than everything else out there, and it doesn't have the chronic stuttering problems that all cheaper JMicron-based controllers suffer.

The Mobi is an older drive, "only" SATA-150. But it is an SLC drive, so I'll use it for the partitions that see the highest write activity, as SLC is more resilient than MLC. Plus, the contents of the drive are more or less throwaway, so if any corruption does develop, I can just replace it with no issues. /var sees log frequent writes, and there may be some Portage compilation in the tempfiles. I've been using a tmpfs on RAM for /var/tmp/portage for some time now, so I don't really think it will hit up the drive much, not with 4GB of RAM installed:

none  /var/tmp/portage tmpfs	noauto,nr_inodes=1M,size=2000M 0 0

See? A dynamic Portage compilation space, ready to occupy 2GB RAM if need be. During compiles, the only time I ever really see the HDDs light up is during the src_unpack (to RAM) and src_install phases.

So I've figured out my drive and partition usage, but the things that are causing the most headaches, and occupying the majority of my research time, are:

1. Which filesystems
2. Which mount options
3. Which schedulers
4. Partition alignment schemes

See, I will have two SSDs in there with Gentoo installed on 'em, but I'll also have a separate magnetic HDD for media storage, so that means a different for each drive.

For 1, ext4 is looking increasingly attractive for the SSDs. I may continue to use ReiserFS for the media drive, as it's worked very well for a few years now. But, given that the Portage tree is just lots and lots of tiny files, perhaps I could continue using ReiserFS on it? Though I would need to deactivate the journal. The Mobi drive should not have any journaling on it -- too many writes.

NILFS2 is another interesting filesystem, but it seems immature. BtrFS also has potential, especially after reading Val's excellent article, but its developers warn against using it for anything other than testing. So I'll stick with something a little more mainstream, yet not so old and cranky as ext3/ext2.

Which brings me to 2: mount options. I've only just begun to read up on suggested options for ext4. data=writeback seems to be one of the more popular suggestions. noatime is a necessity; I've used this option on every single Gentoo install I've ever had. There are several other options I need to investigate, including the dir_index variations.

If I go with ReiserFS, I'd need to research the performance differences between notail and tail. In theory, the latter option could be more efficient for packing more data into fewer blocks, resulting in fewer writes/rewrites. This is at the expense of slightly more CPU usage. notail may result in more speed, but I haven't found many detailed reports of ReiserFS usage on SSDs. One last thing to look up would be the difference between ReiserFS with the journal and without.

The next piece of the puzzle is 3, schedulers. Most of the schedulers in the kernel are designed to keep spinning magnetic disks happy. But since there aren't any moving heads or rotating disks to spin up, the algorithms that are designed for efficient, minimal motion aren't very helpful for SSDs.

The usual solution proposed is to bypass the traditional HDD seek layer overhead by just using the noop scheduler. It's a very simple FIFO-based scheduler. System requests a file, it gets it. No complex queuing up done in the kernel. It lets the extremely fast drive controller do all the work, since it's capable of getting the data where it's needed without stuttering or delays.

However, the deadline scheduler may be as good as noop, as deadline does a certain amount of prioritizing. My understanding is that it's similar to NCQ in this regard, and that using deadline doesn't have any overhead costs. Still doing the research on this.

These two schedulers may be all well and good for the SSDs, but since I'll have two SSDs, a magnetic hard drive, and an optical drive in my box, I can't use the same scheduler for all of 'em. noop would be a poor choice for the HDD, so I may use deadline or stick with the tried-and-true CFQ scheduler.

Fortunately, using different schedulers for different drives is fairly easy:

# echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
# echo noop > /sys/block/sdb/queue/scheduler
# echo cfq > /sys/block/sdc/queue/scheduler

It's just a matter of putting these commands into an initscript to be run at boot.

The last puzzle piece (so far) is 4, partition alignment schemes. This is the most confusing one. The most headache-inducing. The most worrisome one, in that if I screw it up, I could completely hose the performance of the drives, and severely impact the wear and tear on the drive.

The OCZ Vertex is functionally identical to the Super Talent UltraDrive. Same controller and firmware, so Vertex tips will apply to my drive. The OCZ forums have proven rather useful. There's a fair amount of material at the OCZ forums, and even some suggestions by Gentoo users. Unfortunately, some of the threads are rather old, so I'm unsure how much still applies. Given that there have been new hardware revisions, new firmware shipped with the drives, and improvements to the Linux kernel stack (schedulers, libata, etc.).

Ted Ts'o has a pretty good explanation, but it differs from some of the other suggested block sizes. Also, some guides have a radically different approach.

* * *

So, four pieces to the Gentoo installation on an SSD puzzle. Lots of notes so far, and despite four months' research, I feel like I've barely gotten started. I've been thinking and planning to move to an SSD for quite awhile now; it's mostly been a matter of waiting for prices to fall. Now all the components are here, so I'll just have to dive right in and see what I find. Results will, of course, wind up here.

Six months ago I posted some benchmarks of popular gtk+ engines. It's time to revisit those benchmarks and test the engines again, this time using FOSS drivers for my new hardware.

Today I installed my brand-spankin' new graphics card, an ATI RadeonHD 4550, by Sapphire. Getting working 2D acceleration with EXA was a cinch, now that the 2.6.30 kernel is out. Doesn't require anything special in terms of packages; nothing from overlays or bleeding-edge git checkouts. Only needs three ~arch packages: gentoo-sources, libdrm, and mesa.

For this updated round of testing, I used the same gtk+ engines, but also added some new ones. These can all be obtained by installing the following packages: gtk-engines, gnome-themes, gtk-engines-aurora, gtk-engines-candido, gtk-engines-rezlooks, and gtk-engines-xfce. New to the testing list are the Crux, ThinIce, HighContrast, and Redmond95 engines.

Once again, gtkperf-0.40 was used to obtain these benchmarks. With the exception of the graphics hardware and driver, the testing environment is mostly the same. Xfce has been updated to 4.6.1.

Let's see how all these engines perform on my Xfce workstation, eh?

Notes on the hardware:

CPU: Athlon 64 X2 4600+
Graphics: ATI RadeonHD 4550, DVI 1440x900 @ 60Hz
RAM: 4GB DDR2-667
Mobo: ASUS M3N78-VM

Notes on the testing environment:

OS: Gentoo Linux (duh)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-gentoo-r1 #1 SMP PREEMPT x86_64
xf86-video-ati: 6.12.1-r1
CFLAGS: -march=athlon64-sse3 -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer
DE: Xfce 4.6.1
- Xfwm4 with Composite enabled, effects: drop shadows & transparency
- Open applications: 2 instances of x11-terms/terminal

Custom themes are noted with *. These are personal themes I've made, nothing more than simple color modifications of an existing freely available theme. No additional images are used, so rendering time should not be affected.

All tests were conducted 3 times, using a Test Round setting of 100. I picked the best score of the 3, as I was looking for best-case usage conditions. The results are ranked in order from fastest to slowest.

Engine: HighContrast
Theme: HighContrast

GtkEntry - time: 0.03
GtkComboBox - time: 0.63
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.46
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.04
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.02
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.04
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.03
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.06
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.18
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.08
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.91
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.21
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.89
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.11
---
Total time: 4.70

Engine: Rezlooks
Theme: Rezlooks Blue Ink*

GtkEntry - time: 0.05
GtkComboBox - time: 0.61
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.41
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.05
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.03
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.06
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.04
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.11
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.18
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.07
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.94
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.17
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.89
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.11
---
Total time: 4.72

Engine: Mist
Theme: Mist

GtkEntry - time: 0.03
GtkComboBox - time: 0.65
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.45
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.06
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.03
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.05
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.04
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.10
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.18
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.07
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.87
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.17
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.91
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.12
---
Total time: 4.72

Engine: ThinIce
Theme: ThinIce

GtkEntry - time: 0.03
GtkComboBox - time: 0.65
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.42
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.07
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.03
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.05
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.03
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.07
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.19
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.09
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.91
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.16
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.88
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.12
---
Total time: 4.72

Engine: Glide
Theme: Glider

GtkEntry - time: 0.06
GtkComboBox - time: 0.65
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.49
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.08
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.03
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.05
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.05
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.14
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.20
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.09
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.85
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.20
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.87
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.14
---
Total time: 4.90

Engine: Redmond95
Theme: Redmond

GtkEntry - time: 0.04
GtkComboBox - time: 0.76
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.57
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.06
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.02
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.10
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.12
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.13
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.19
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.08
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.90
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.17
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.90
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.12
---
Total time: 5.16

Engine: Clearlooks
Theme: Glossy

GtkEntry - time: 0.02
GtkComboBox - time: 0.77
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.56
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.19
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.12
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.12
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.08
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.11
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.18
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.10
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.95
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.17
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.91
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.12
---
Total time: 5.40

Engine: Crux
Theme: Crux

GtkEntry - time: 0.03
GtkComboBox - time: 0.89
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.75
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.14
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.04
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.05
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.06
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.10
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.18
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.12
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.90
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.16
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.90
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.13
---
Total time: 5.46

Engine: Industrial
Theme: Industrial

GtkEntry - time: 0.05
GtkComboBox - time: 1.13
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.54
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.06
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.05
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.15
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.06
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.07
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.19
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.15
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.89
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.16
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.91
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.12
---
Total time: 5.54

Engine: Aurora
Theme: Aurora

GtkEntry - time: 0.05
GtkComboBox - time: 1.10
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.90
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.20
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.06
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.12
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.08
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.16
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.19
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.13
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.92
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.17
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.89
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.12
---
Total time: 6.08

Engine: Pixmap
Theme: Elegant Autumn*

GtkEntry - time: 0.04
GtkComboBox - time: 1.00
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.80
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.15
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.15
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.22
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.06
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.11
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.23
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.23
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.98
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.17
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.92
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.13
---
Total time: 6.19

Engine: Candido
Theme: Graphite Light

GtkEntry - time: 0.05
GtkComboBox - time: 1.94
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.36
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.08
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.17
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.22
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.07
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.09
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.22
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.16
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.89
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.17
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.91
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.12
---
Total time: 7.45

Interesting. Six months (and one new graphics card and driver) later, there's been a bit of a shuffle. All engines tested are clustered much closer together. There used to be a 12-second gap between the fastest and slowest engines. Now it's only 3 seconds. Part of that disparity comes from new versions of the engines. Aurora in particular has made phenomenal improvements since 1.4; the numbers you see here are from version 1.5.1. It's no longer at the back of the pack -- last place now belongs to Candido, which is still rather slow, especially in the ComboBox tests.

Curiously, although the completion times are stacked very closely, there seemed to be a general slowdown. While the older gtk+ engines still turn in respectable times, they're not always at the front of the pack. In particular, the Pixmap engine, which has historically had a speedy reputation, is now trailing most other engines. The theme used is extremely simple. I'm not sure what's causing the slowdown here. Perhaps its reputation for speed is no longer deserved; even six months ago it wasn't a standout.

There's no longer an engine that can turn in 3-second completion times; in fact, the four fastest engines all tied at 4.7 seconds. Of the four, Rezlooks is without a doubt the prettiest. Many of the screenshots in my devspace feature Rezlooks themes.

Two of the engines added for this round of benchmarks, Crux and Redmond95, end up in the middle of the pack. They're not particularly fast, nor are they pleasing to the eye. The other two newcomers, ThinIce and HighContrast, distinguish themselves by jumping to the very top of the charts. HighContrast is undoubtedly the ugliest engine presented here, while ThinIce's appearance rather resembles Mist. It's tolerable, but nothing I'd use, personally.

Once again, I'll stick with Rezlooks-based themes, as well as the occasional standout Pixmap or Clearlooks theme such as ClearLUX. ClearLUX in particular is extremely easy on the eyes when doing late-night computer work.

---

But where are the Xfce engine results? Let's take a look . . .

The Xfce engine results baffled me. The completion times varied wildly, everywhere from middle-of-the-road to flat-out fast to back-of-the-pack. So I intermittently benchmarked the Xfce engine for an hour, under varying degrees of desktop activity. Everything from lots of different applications open to a completely blank desktop. I couldn't generate consistent results. So, I decided to close down all applications and run a final series of three tests. Presented here are the slowest and fastest times logged for this series.

Engine: Xfce
Theme: Xfce

Slowest times
GtkEntry - time: 0.06
GtkComboBox - time: 1.18
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.50
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.08
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.07
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.08
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.03
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.06
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.20
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.14
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.90
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.17
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.94
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.15
---
Total time: 5.56

Fastest times
GtkEntry - time: 0.02
GtkComboBox - time: 0.55
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.43
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.06
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.06
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.06
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.03
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.04
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.18
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.12
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.86
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 1.19
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.90
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.12
---
Total time: 4.63

Look at that. A completion time of 4.63 seconds, well ahead of any other engine. That's best-case though; it can be almost as slow as the Aurora engine, which is notoriously heavy. The DrawingArea and TextView numbers are fairly static in both sets. Everything else tends to vary widely. No idea why. Perhaps the developers have made some changes under the hood between Xfce 4.4 and 4.6?

My next bit of tinkering (after a guided tour of hacking up Abiword ebuilds) will be hardware and software.

NewEgg is having a sale, so I just purchased an ATI RadeonHD 4550. This is the cheapest one on the 'net, and it has free shipping in addition to the sale price. And most importantly, it's fanless! And it's got a low-profile bracket!

I've been planning to downsize or "sidegrade" (not upgrade) my main desktop workstation for some time now. Moving to a smaller desktop case saves a few square feet of precious floor space, and it's part of reducing the overall system energy consumption.

I intend to change my computing habits, starting with using less power and quitting 3D games (such as UT2004). So moving to a less capable graphics card is a big step in that direction. As of right now, the radeon and radeonhd drivers only have working 2D acceleration, which is all I expect to need.

The last time I used an ATI card, I was extremely impressed with its 2D rendering speed and flicker-free video playback. Granted, that was an R500 card and the RadeonHD 4550 is an R700 card. However, supposedly its 2D driver is just as good as the code for the older card, so I expect a similar experience. Although KMS and 3D acceleration are nowhere near ready, I don't need them. Working KMS on my Intel laptop is nice, but it's not crucial. Nor will it be for my desktop.

The most important things for my new desktop are good FOSS driver support/performance, silence, and adaptability for case changes. I'm completely spoiled by running nothing but fanless graphics chips. After the terrible experience with the fan on my X1950Pro, I purchased an AC Accelero S1 rev. 2. It made a world of difference! The 4550 I bought today is also fanless, and has a much smaller heatsink.

Which brings me to my next point: adaptability. Sure, I could have just (re)used my X1950Pro, since it already has working 2D and 3D acceleration, and has a fanless cooler, but it also uses more power than even my GeForce. Which makes sense, since the 1950 was a high-end card for its day, and the 7600GT was a low-to-midrange card. In every test I found, the RadeonHD 4550 uses 18W or less at max 3D load, and idles at about 7W. That's outstanding for regular desktop usage.

That'll let me stuff the card and the rest of my computer into a microATX case such as the Antec NSK1380. Or even into a low-profile case like the super-slim desktop form factors. I'll need a new CPU heatsink, possibly even a more modern CPU. My current Athlon X2 is a 2.4ghz 65W chip, but moving down to a 45W chip that's even faster (say, 2.7ghz) saves even more power and heat. That'll let me run my whole system off a tiny, super-efficient, space-saving PSU like the PicoPSU.

And it probably won't stop there . . . I'll probably trade my 160GB RAID1 array for a single SSD, and just be smarter about making more frequent offline backups. The SSD will likely be an OCZ Vertex or one of the other Barefoot ARM-based drives. No sh*tty JMicron controllers for me, thankya very much.

A small, cute new case, a seriously efficient PSU, CPU, GPU, and HDD . . . so that's basically a whole 'nother workstation, but I think it's worth it. Fun, too! The challenge of choosing and assembling parts is the shortest. The longer challenge is reinstalling Gentoo, tweaking the SSD for max performance and longevity, and getting the graphics driver to work.

These last two bits will likely be the trickiest, as the radeon driver seems to work best when using either a .28 kernel or a really recent 2.6.30. However, the later .30-rcX kernels have serious issues with ReiserFS, my preferred filesystem. And only some folks have reported that the latest -rcX versions have fixed the regressions. Ah well. While I've always experienced the best performance with ReiserFS, that's been on normal magnetic drives. Apparently the new hotness is stuff like BtrFS, NILFS, and ext4. Probably end up going with ext4 as I wouldn't entirely trust the first two with my data safety just yet.

Ahhh, hardware hacking. It's so fun, yet it's over so quickly. It's an expensive hobby to keep up constantly, which is why I try to go years between component changes, and spend the intervening time tweaking the software. Will it ever be "good enough?" Time will tell.

Note: this post was originally written a few weeks ago, shortly after the Siag Office experiment. Since the draft was written, an Abiword bug has been opened with a different ebuild. Guess I was too slow about finishing up my draft and publishing it. Ah, well. Now you can at least track the progress of the latest Abiword.

After the lengthy but fun entry on working with Siag Office, I've got s'more goodies. It's time to remove more Gnome packages, as I want to have as close to a pure Xfce desktop as possible. Abiword has always been my default word processor, but it has always been burdened with Gnome libraries and other dependencies. The 2.7 development series changes that, removing the need for many Gnome packages.

After reading a comment, I decided to hack up an ebuild for Abiword 2.7.1, the latest developmental release. This is not a stable release; the changes made to the 2.7 series will eventually become the stable 2.8 series. As upstream warns, don't run developmental releases on production servers.

The first step was to copy the latest ebuild, 2.6.8, to my local overlay in /usr/local/portage and renaming it to 2.7.1. The next step was to determine what's changed since 2.6.8.

I took a look through Abiword's ViewVC to see for myself whether or not the pesky Gnome dependencies have been removed or made optional. Seems they have.

I also discovered that there are several totally unnecessary dependencies present in our current ebuilds. Moreover, several configure switches have been renamed from --enable to --with. This means changing the $(use_enable) bits to $(use_with). Also, some switch options have been renamed or removed; there's no more gnomeui or symbol switches, and the printing switch was renamed to print. These were all simple, quick changes to make in the 2.7.1 ebuild. Removing a line here, deleting 3 letters there. Basic stuff.

Another change was getting rid of the xml and expat configure switches, since they're no longer used. While Abiword does use expat, it's already pulled in by libgsf, so we're safe there. Even the internal Abiword documentation notes this in the various configure files, which is why they don't have explicit configure switches any longer.

The longer changes involved studying configure.in to see what it says are the new optional dependencies and adding those as new USE flags within the ebuild. goffice is now optional, and requires an updated version (0.6). So I added an "office" flag to IUSE at the top of the ebuild, and a line to the pkg_setup function:

$(use_with office goffice)

This USE flag can always be renamed later. The important thing is getting the initial functionality in place. It's very easy to add new flags into the Abiword ebuild; it really just requires copying and adjusting the existing USE info.

Once the critical dependencies and versions were sorted out, it was time to update the internals of the ebuild itself.

One of the things that tends to happen when you have a package in the tree for a long time is that cruft from old ebuild versions tends to linger around for a few years. In this case, the ebuild has a few EAPI-1 tidbits like SLOT dependencies, but it also has a lot of leftover baggage from the pre-EAPI days. Part of that includes redundant numbering. There were a lot of specific minimum versions that are completely unnecessary, as the minimum version hasn't existed for a long, long time. So I went through the ebuild and stripped out all the unnecessary versions, leaving just the category/packagename.

Only one package now needs a specific minimum version, gtk+-2.14. Once gtk+-2.12 is removed, then the dependency can be simplified to a SLOT dependency on gtk+:2, to avoid pulling in gtk+-1.x. I did the same SLOT update for the new required version of goffice and for glib-2. All part of the process of updating to the good stuff present in the EAPIs.

With the EAPI-2 update, it's possible to include USE dependencies in ebuilds. This means that you can get rid of hacks like built_with_use, which require a dependency of Abiword (such as Pango) to have been built with the X flag. The whole function to abort the merge if Pango was not built with USE="X" took 4 lines:

if ! built_with_use --missing true x11-libs/pango X; then
eerror "You must rebuild x11-libs/pango with USE='X'"
die "You must rebuild x11-libs/pango with USE='X'"
fi

With EAPI-2, I was able to update the ebuild to this RDEPEND:

x11-libs/pango[X]

Pretty slick, huh?

The next step was to try a test-compile. Run emerge abiword and watch the results.

Hmm, the merge aborts right at the very end. Turns out that the sed scripts carried over from the 2.6.8 ebuild aren't working: they die because the files they worked with no longer exist. Time to figure out where that .desktop file and other stuff have gone.

The first sed script is looking to change some install directories in a nonexistent Makefile. A quick grep through the Makefiles shows that the old change is no longer necessary; nothing has the old incorrect path. This sed script can be commented out.

The second sed script wants to alter the lines in the .desktop file Abiword installs. However, Portage can't find the file to sed, so it aborts the merge. Turns out that Abiword wants to install the file to /usr/share/abiword-2.7/applications/abiword.desktop. That is a nonstandard location, so no wonder Portage can't find it. If it installs here, Abiword won't show up in your desktop menu. The trick is to get Abiword to install its .desktop file to the right location.

Let's review what's happened so far:

1. Create a copy of the latest ebuild to work on.
2. Visit the upstream homepage and changelogs.
3. View the various configure files to determine new dependencies, versions, unnecessary dependencies, optional dependencies, renamed arguments, and the like.
4. Go to work on the ebuild!
a) Hammer out the raw dependency changes.
b) Fix up the USE flags and related functions.
c) Fix up version and SLOT stuff.
5. Give it a test run.
a) Since a couple of minor errors were found, revisit the ebuild. Fix sed scripts.
b) Test it again.

Now Abiword is compiling, installing, and running. The next step is to tidy up the ebuild. This means putting the dependencies and USE flags back into alphabetical order, removing extraneous whitespace, fixing typos present in the original 2.6.8 ebuild, and deleting any unnecessary comments. There's also the small matter of getting the .desktop file to install to the right location . . . call it homework.

The final step (for me) is to upload the ebuild where you can view it. This ebuild is a working template for the 2.8 releases. I plan to keep tracking it, keeping up with the changes. No more forced Gnome dependencies! Yay!

Of course, I was only able to remove two packages: goffice and libgnomeprintui. Something is still pulling in libgnomecups, libgnomeprint, gnome-keyring, gnome-vfs, and several others. The next thing I'll investigate is all the gtk+ Bluetooth apps lying around. I won't rest in my quest to have a totally lightweight, Gnome-free, Xfce laptop.

* * *

This is a follow-up to my Siag Office experiment:

I've discovered that some of Siag's peripheral programs run in spite of the font errors. xedplus, tsiag, gvu, and xfiler all run. They still display the same font errors in the console output, but at least the application itself works. Though I'm not sure that xfiler is working correctly. It pops up a file browser window, but I can't click on an item to open it. I can select it with the mouse, but to open it I have to hit Enter. Annoying. But at least it does go to that folder, or open the document/picture in the appropriate Siag utility.

I still can't get the word processor or spreadsheet working, and those form the core of Siag Office. Any tips?

I was poking through the contents of my world file and USE flags the other day, trying to trim down the number of Gnome dependencies present on my Xfce laptop. Abiword is the application that requires all the Gnome stuff. If only it didn't need deprecated libraries like libgnomeprint, the rest of the Gnome desktop wouldn't get pulled in.

So, I started looking around at alternative word processors and office suites. There's always OpenOffice, but I don't really like using something as slow and bloated as OOo even at the best of times. There are some other office packages available, but they're for Qt/KDE. Or they're made of something really icky, like Java.

And then I found it: Siag Office. This office suite dates back a number of years. It used to be present in Gentoo, actually, but was removed five years ago.

I took a look at the upstream homepage; it still seems to be sporadically developed. Last release was in 2006. I poked around in the documentation, INSTALL, READMEs, and whatnot in the upstream CVS to get a better feel for what's required. Siag mostly relies on little-used X libraries, including old-school Athena widgets and their derivatives. It also has its own expanded widget kit, Mowitz. Siag ain't pretty, though at least it looks better than Motif-based apps. Most importantly, it's reputed to be very fast, needing very few dependencies.

The Portage CVS attic contained outdated ebuilds; the latest Siag release is 3.6.1, and the latest Mowitz release is .3.1. I used the outdated ebuilds as a foundation for creating my own ebuilds. And that's when the trouble, I mean fun, really began.

For starters, the old ebuilds had a lot of cruft leftover from the pre-modular X days. Stuff like virtual/x11, deprecated configure/make functions, unnecessary USE flags . . . even some bad configure switches from when the code did odd things, like --host=${CHOST}. These obvious mistakes required fixing. Then I checked the Getting Siag page to get more of an idea of the current dependencies.

Siag-3.6.1 has build dependencies on gmp, Mowitz, tcl, libXpm, and libXaw. It has optional runtime dependencies for Python, ccmath, and netpbm. The dependency on libXaw may be interchangeable with other Athena widget-compatible libraries. I sent an email upstream to verify this, as comments in the source code give the impression that while Xaw can be used, so can XawM (a variant created by the Siag folks), Xaw3d, and possibly even neXtaw. In my email, I asked specifically about neXtaw, as Mowitz relies on neXtaw. I figure it's best to just use one widget set if possible to give a more unified appearance. Perhaps neXtaw can be used as a drop-in replacement?

Anyway, once the dependencies were updated for the Siag ebuild, it was time to redo the configure/install section. This is actually still a work in progress; I haven't taken the time to really nail down the optional dependencies, add final USE flags, etc. I've been trying to get working ebuilds, not perfect ebuilds. Not yet.

Once the Siag ebuild was working, I moved on to the Mowitz ebuild. This required many of the same fixes that Siag did. The biggest headache, though, was trying to get the Xaw dependency hammered out.

The old version used to be able to use a number of Xaw varieties, same as Siag. However, the latest version seemed to have narrowed it down to either Xaw3d or neXtaw, default is neXtaw. The configure switch --with-xaw3d= should allow for either one, right? The source code comments in the INSTALL file say the same thing. Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up in reality. If neXtaw is not installed, the configure phase will fail, saying it can't find the Xaw implementation (aka neXtaw). I spent an hour throwing Xaw3d and Xaw name/path variants at it before giving in. How ironic that the --with-xaw3d= switch can't actually use Xaw3d. So I let it just run with the default neXtaw, updating the ebuild for this build dependency. Worked just fine. Good thing that neXtaw was never taken out of the Portage tree! The neXtaw ebuild, at least, is up to date.

In my email to the upstream maintainer, I mentioned that the configure and/or documentation is incorrect. Hopefully I'll get a response, but it has been a few years since the code was touched upstream.

Now that I'd hammered out the dependencies for Siag and its two required dependencies (Mowitz and neXtaw), it was time to merge the package. The sourcecode for Siag itself is only abou 1.5MB. That's right, a whole integrated office suite, with word processor, spreadsheet, animation app, file manager, text editor, and previewer . . . less than 2MB. That's quite an accomplishment! Only took a few minutes to compile.

I discovered that Siag is so old that it seems to predate the common .desktop files used to display an application in your program menu, or at least upstream hasn't bundled any. I'll have to write up my own .desktop entries and add in the accompanying installation function into the ebuilds. So I had to use the command line to launch 'em. That's when the biggest issue hit: Siag won't run.

None of the binaries installed can actually run; I have hit upon a rather famous error that dates back to 1998 or so, and has popped up here and there in the intervening decade:

$ siag
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" to type FontStruct
Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
Panic: can't load any fonts!

I'm not entirely positive what causes this; Google searching has widely disparate bug reports. It's probably something to do with the way pre-modular X did font handling. Siag seems to want to do stuff in certain ways that the old monolithic X did. It may be able to compile against more modern libraries, but whatever it wants to do is too old-school. There's probably some leftover cruft hardcoded somewhere. I just haven't found what, yet.

At least I can see the errors when running the main applications like siag and pw. The animation app, egon, won't even show that much. Just as in the linux.com review, egon simply would not run:

$ egon
Segmentation fault

I'm unable to perform any further diagnosis. I don't have any debug libraries or applications installed on the laptop, and at this point I'm not going to waste any more time on just this one application.

I'll still try to get the rest of Siag running -- there are a few solutions for the runtime font failure, but none of them have worked for me so far. I have not yet given up; I'm still trying to find ways to slim down my laptop, get rid of Gnome dependencies, and lighten up my Xfce environment.

I've put my work-in-progress ebuilds in my devspace. Once again, I should remind you that the Siag ebuild in particular is not yet finished. It'll do the most important things--compile and install Siag--but it's not finished. If you're looking to cut your teeth on some simple ebuild tasks, you're welcome to spend some time in our Gentoo Development Manual and send me a patch. Working with ebuilds really isn't intimidating the way it may appear at first. Mostly, the work just requires time to sort through issues as they turn up. Time, not arcane knowledge of the most secretive inner workings of code.

Also, if you've got any potential solutions to the font startup failure, I'd love to hear from you! This is the last remaining barrier that I know of to getting Siag working. Well, that and setting up Siag to print, as it doesn't have a graphical interface. Instead, Siag needs you to tell it the proper CUPS commandline stuff. Which, again, is just a bit more time and reading the manpage for lpr. Time and reading. That's most of the process. Time, effort, and persistence.

I'm hoping it'll pay off for Siag Office.

Thanks to Markos Chandras, RedNotebook is now in the tree. RedNotebook is a really cool lightweight journal for your desktop. It needs only pygtk and pyyaml. It's got nifty features like a calendar, tags, templates, searches, format export, and more. It's quite actively developed upstream; I plan to proxy-maintain it for the good of Gentoo users everywhere. Go on, try it out!

* * *

Also, as you may have noticed, the look of my weblog has changed. Instead of the Evopress skin, I'm now using the Gentoo skin I created for Planet Gentoo, based on Evopress. Now it's all-purple, just like the old Planet look before the b2evolution upgrade some months ago. You wouldn't believe how long it took me to create the top purple graphic; I ended up having to hand-edit that thing pixel by pixel. I couldn't find any easy way using the GIMP to recolor the existing blue gradient into a purple gradient. So I made my own, pixel by pixel. I think it looks pretty good.

All developers that want to switch to the new skin:

1. Log into your backoffice
2. Go to Blog settings -> Skin
3. Select the "evonews" skin
4. Presto, a nice new purplish blog. Wear your colors with pride!

Ignore the "evogentoo" skin; that's a leftover test skin. I still have to iron out that bug, and fix the preview so that it appears on the correct skin entry. Enjoy!

Man, it's been awhile since I blogged. I meant to keep putting up a monthly Xfce desktop, share some tips, talk about the latest Gentoo work, etc. And then real life got in the way.

Laptop

I killed yet another piece of hardware when updating my Thinkpad R61i on Friday. I've been sick this whole week, so I had some free time. The laptop hadn't been updated since early February, so there were 176 packages, including the big move to GCC 4.3, which necessitated a system rebuild. Unfortunately, I left the battery in while the system was on AC power for the compiling work. I guess the heat must have built up too much, because the battery got fried. Got the dreaded "battery light flashes amber rapidly" error. So now I only have the extended-life battery, which is heavier and bulkier.

Add that to the list of hardware that compiling Gentoo has killed over the years. The list includes another battery, an external power brick, an internal PSU, two motherboards, two RAM sticks, one RAM slot, two hard drives, and a fan. I'm really on a roll, here.

I still can't find a replacement battery for less than $90, even on eBay, so I may hold off. What I did do was order two more gigs of RAM, to bring the total up to 4GB. Only cost $40 at Amazon, free shipping. Why the RAM? While updating, I ran into the dreaded OOM-killer! The GCC 4.3 compile uses more than the 2GB available and it aborted the merge. This was with nothing else running, too. So be warned: if GCC dies when you move to 4.3, back off on your MAKEOPTS. I had to adjust mine from -j3 to -j2 while compiling GCC and glibc.

Also, while I was updating my whole system, I decided to move the rest of my X/kernel stack to ~arch, as I wanted the new Intel KMS/GEM/UXA hotness. This necessitated using ~arch xf86-video-intel and Mesa, as well as ~arch gentoo-sources, as 2.6.29 has some needed code not present in 2.6.28. I discovered that while this part of the graphical stack was just fine for KMS and fast graphical login, xorg-server-1.5.3 resulted in hard lockups as soon as I opened any windows. I had to grab xorg-server-1.6, libXfont, and randrproto from the X11 overlay in order to get a usable environment. It works great! No more lockups.

So, how much of an improvement is the new stack over what was available in February? I'll let the following numbers speak for themselves. These are the median-high numbers recorded. For the old stack, the numbers varied from 48FPS to 59FPS. For the new stack, from 489FPS to 504FPS. Sync to vblank and vsync have never been enabled.

xorg-server-1.5.3-r1, libdrm-2.4.4, xf86-video-intel-2.6.1, mesa-7.3, gentoo-sources-2.6.27-r8

$ glxgears 
Failed to initialize GEM.  Falling back to classic.
292 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.272 FPS

xorg-server-1.6, libdrm-2.4.6, xf86-video-intel-2.6.3-r1, mesa-7.4, gentoo-sources-2.6.29-r1

$ glxgears 
2516 frames in 5.0 seconds = 503.174 FPS

Now, the usual caveat about glxgears not being a good benchmarking tool applies here. However, it is useful for relative comparison from one version to the next. And as you can see, it's an order of magnitude better. I notice that stuff is drawn much smoother; there's less flickering especially when shifting Terminal windows around. And I haven't hardly begun to tweak my system for best UXA performance. KMS is nice and smooth; it happens pretty quick in the boot process. No more flickering, just fast loading of SLiM and then Xfce.

My xorg.conf is pretty minimal; the only changes I've specified for the Intel driver section are these:

Option	    "FramebufferCompression" "false"
Option	    "AccelMethod" "UXA"
Option      "Tiling" "false"
Option      "EnablePageFlip" "true"

There are probably some other things I should add for maximum performance, so I'll have to spend several more days hunting for 'em. But out-of-the-box, I'm extremely impressed with the current X stack.

Now all I need is smooth full-screen Flash video performance . . .

Xfce 4.6

The other thing I put on the laptop was Xfce 4.6.1. Decided that as long as my core graphics stack is part ~arch, it wouldn't hurt to try out the latest and greatest Xfce hotness. Now that some outstanding bugs were fixed from 4.6.0 (including a remote security bug, and an icons issue), I thought it'd be worth it. It's pretty slick. The desktop environment is initialized a bit faster than even a fully tweaked 4.4.3.

About the only outstanding issue I have with it is that there is no graphical menu editor. At first, I couldn't get a satisfactory menu even editing the XML file by hand; it was just too different from the old one. So my menu was cluttered with useless toplevel entries, such as Web Browser, File Manager, and so on. Fortunately, Mike pointed me to the solution, so now all offending stuff has been cleared out. Right now my menu works just fine, so I only really need a graphical menu editor for convenience's sake.

I really like 4.6 a lot. The artwork packaged with it is outstanding; I'm using one of the stock backgrounds because it's just that sexy.

Xfce 4.6 is a smash hit, so well done, guys. Very well done. And there's even more good stuff planned for the future. There's a great interview on Planet Xfce with one of the core developers. He discusses some of the exciting stuff coming down the pipe for Thunar, so make sure to read it.

Gentoo

I've been rather quiet on the Gentoo front for the last three months, because life in the outside world has a way of unexpectedly intruding on me. I've been on devaway since February while I try to get stuff into some semblance of order. Sadly, however, I've had to do much more documentation work than I originally scheduled, which keeps cutting into my plans for other areas. I've made a bunch of bugfixes and commits over the last couple of weeks especially. One of the most visible changes is in the Get Gentoo page, putting the automated weekly builds at the top. The handbooks will be updated, too, but they require a tremendous overhaul, so I'll need all the resources of my fellow GDP members to accomplish that. If I can get 'em, that is.

One of the other things I like to do is find some interesting little-known application, determine its usefulness, then hack up an ebuild for it. It's really good practice, actually.

Out of all the applications I've written and updated ebuilds for, the only one that's got me stumped is WordGrinder. I've been in contact with WordGrinder's upstream author, who's a really helpful guy, but I still can't get the ebuild working. While compiling and installing by hand works great, something happens during the compile phase as run by Portage where it violates the sandbox, killing the merge.

Plus, given the pmfile used by the package, it doesn't really respect a user's CFLAGS/CHOST and related configuration. That has to be altered somehow, so I've been trying to work out a similar solution to the one used by our dev-lang/lua ebuilds. No real luck there, but it's not my first priority. What I really want to do is have the merge workin' with Portage. So it's an interesting, informative, occasionally frustrating learning process.

Anyway, take a look at all the stuff in there. I recently reorganized the ebuilds by category/package, instead of dumping everything into a single directory. Some of these have since moved into Portage sometime after I wrote the ebuild for 'em, and some (like Songbird and WordGrinder) are works in progress. I've run into quite a few nifty apps; places like GnomeFiles are excellent resources. Most of the stuff in here I discovered on GnomeFiles, and a lot of the packages on the website are simple enough that it's just a few minutes' work to hack up an ebuild.

I've just discovered two very interesting minimal word processors. They're designed by writers, for writers. They aim to get out of the way and let you just write, with no distractions.

PyRoom

First is PyRoom, which relies only on pygtk. It's really quite minimal and not distracting in the slightest, and easily themeable. I like it a lot. I created an ebuild, available here. Thank goodness for distutils!

WordGrinder

Second is WordGrinder, an even more minimal application that's entirely console-based. Unfortunately, it uses some weird freaky build system called PrimeMover, and it's scary. I asked one of my fellow developers who maintains the Lua package about it, but he's never heard of it. There aren't any eclasses for dealing with any Lua build system.

According to WordGrinder's Readme, the PrimeMover setup should be pretty simple. However, take a look at the pmfile itself. Man, that's ugly. It looks like three hours of judicious sed usage within the ebuild. I can't see any other way to alter it to something sanely installable to /usr.

If anyone has any tips, I'm all ears. I've got a skeleton ebuild for WordGrinder available in my repository, but it really needs fleshing out. So, who's willing to help?

Hardware: graphics shuffle redux

In other news, I had a really fun time getting my ATI X1950 Pro to work (again) with a silent aftermarket cooler (AC Accelero v1 rev2) and the latest bleeding-edge radeon, mesa, and libdrm packages. The hardware mods were fun, but the software . . . well, that's a long story for next time.

Desktop

Oh yes, and this month's Xfce desktop. Token uncluttered version here. All those artists in that Thunar window are amazing. You should be listening to them right now.

icons: Meliae-dust (needed something reddish)
gtk+: Rezlooks L & D
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk (yes, it is confusingly named)
background: The Empire (from pixelgirlpresents)

On Christmas Eve, a special present arrived from UPS: the HIS Radeon X1950 Pro I purchased on eBay. For the week prior to Christmas I removed the discrete nVidia 7600GT and ran off the integrated nVidia Geforce 8200 chip in my motherboard. Utter pain!

Drawing the screen, whether compositing was on or off, was painfully slow. Running any kind of game was out of the question. UT2004 was impossible. I managed to gain a bit of 2D speed by adding GlyphCache and InitialPixmapPlacement options to xorg.conf, but the desktop was still slow as molasses. Made using the computer quite painful. I can personally verify all the reports that nVidia's drivers for the Geforce 8000 series suck balls are quite true. The only thing I gained was being able to run the framebuffer console at 1440x900, my monitor's native resolution. The Geforce 8200 supports this framebuffer mode; the 7600GT only supports up to 1024x768. Not that it matters once Xorg is launched. Anyway, that was a miserable failure, so I was really happy when the HIS Radeon card showed up.

To be honest, I spent a few more bucks on it than I'd like. With shipping, it was about $51. But I figured this could be a tech toy for the next several months. After this fall's debacle with that HIS RadeonHD 4670, I picked up an older R500 card for half the cost, and this one is at the top of the line for its generation. It should have been an upgrade on my nVidia 7600GT even with the FOSS drivers. With all the documentation ATI has released, the developers of the FOSS driver (xf86-video-ati in my case) were able to get working 2D and 3D acceleration some months ago. So, emboldened by all the articles and forums posts over at Phoronix on the exciting things happening to the FOSS Radeon/Xorg/Mesa stack, I gave it a whirl.

The Good

1. There is indeed 3D acceleration. It's partly usable.
2. The 2D acceleration is the fastest of any chip I tried, faster than even the 7600GT with the proprietary driver. Once I switched from XAA to EXA acceleration, it was even faster!
3. Running at my monitor's native resolution at the framebuffer console is possible.
4. It was nice to be able to remove all proprietary kernel modules.
5. The whole desktop stack loads a bit faster, with less modesetting flicker.
6. 3D performance is actually better with the FOSS drivers than it is with ATI's Catalyst (fglrx) driver.

All the stuttering and lockups I'd run into with the RadeonHD 4670 card a few months ago? Yeah, I now believe those weren't hardware issues at all, but shitty, shitty fglrx driver code. I ran into the exact same thing when trying to use fglrx with the X1950 Pro. UT2004 was a constant stutter-fest. Absolutely unusable. When it comes to the proprietary vs. FOSS drivers for usability, there's no contest. FOSS wins across the board.

The Bad

1. Keywording 70 packages or so in package.keywords is a tedious chore. I was after the latest X-server, Radeon, and Mesa updates, which necessitated moving to ~arch for most of the required X packages.
2. I can't switch virtual terminals. The monitor shuts off if it's running on anything but VT7 once X is loaded. Apparently I'm not the only one to experience this issue with this card.
3. Poor 3D performance. I had to turn down all settings to minimums in UT2004, though I kept the resolution maxed. And even with all the minimizing, framerates grew pretty choppy throughout the game. Though the R500 performance has come a long way in the Radeon driver, it's still nowhere near the level offered by my 7600GT and the proprietary nVidia driver. I dunno if the RadeonHD driver would offer any improvement; it shares a large part of its codebase with the Radeon driver.
4. The "gotchas" involved with switching from the proprietary nVidia driver to anything else. If you switch from one proprietary driver to an open-source driver, or a proprietary (nVidia) to proprietary (ATI), you'll have to manually delete a few libGL files, as the symlinks get shattered in a way that eselect doesn't know how to handle. Let's hope that bug gets fixed soon.

The Ugly

1. The fan. I think the video card's fan may have been damaged in transit. I took out the card after just a week because the noise from the fan was so damned annoying. Now, it's not that it's particularly loud; it's not all that much louder than the system fans (which are pretty quiet even when at max). No, what really grated on me was the hideous noise character of this fan. I've asked for some help from folks in the know, so we'll see where this goes. Too bad too; it uses the same IceQ cooler that the 4670 uses, and the 4670's cooler was amazing. I couldn't hardly hear it no matter the load on the card. It had a smooth, pleasant noise character, blending right in with my system fans at low RPMs.
2. Running into the ALSA and OpenAL updates at the same time I was trying to upgrade my hardware and its drivers. ALSA cannot compile. Bug still not fixed.

The new OpenAL version seems to be from a different upstream, one who has no idea what he's doing as far as documentation goes. I had a working config file for .0.0.8, and 1.5.304 broke it. There's nothing but an extremely sparse sample config to suggest what to do. No matter what I put in the new .ini-style config file, I couldn't make it pick up my microphone. When it finally did seem to be able to identify plughw:0,0, it then petulantly died with the message that the requested buffer size was too large. Based on IRC logs I found via Google, upstream suggests that's ALSA's fault, not OpenAL. Whatever, man. All I know is that the previous versions of OpenAL have always worked regardless of my ALSA version. The new one doesn't. So I added 1.5 to package.mask and downgraded. Presto, working microphone. Just the thing for the upcoming UT2004 tourney.
3. Spending $50 just a week before ATI releases the long-awaited R600/R700 programming documentation. Yeah, I'm kicking myself a bit. I'm wishing that I still had that HIS RadeonHD 4670, something that should have better performance than even an X1950 Pro, no matter which drivers are used. But as it is, the FOSS driver devs don't really expect to get a working driver with any kind of OpenGL acceleration for another few months. Approximate feature parity with the R500's current driver codebase is expected in another 8 months or so. So it'd be a long wait, but one that I'm starting to think is worth it.
4. Did I mention the fan? I can't stick that thing back in the case until I've found a cheap solution to silencing the beast. It's not worth pouring a lot of money into it. I mean, if money is being tossed about, I may as well pick up a silent low- to mid-range 4000 card off NewEgg (again).

* * *

The X1950 Pro is currently stored in the closet. I'll dig it out again once I find some solutions to various bugs. Or when more 3D performance improvements are merged. I'd like to use it for UT2004 as well as general desktop work, but I need better 3D performance. And I need to fix that fan! Maybe I can find a decently priced Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 rev 2 someplace.

I'm also really looking forward to the coming KMS and GEM support for R500 cards, hopefully that will all be merged into the 2.6.29 kernel. Just a few more months . . .

For all the forumites, bloggers, wikifolks, mailing list members, bugzilla commenters, and general Gentoo netizens:

Please stop spreading bad advice such as ebuild foo digest. It does not exist. Digests have not been present in the Portage tree for a year, ever since the tree was converted to Manifest2 format.

If you've made a local modification to an ebuild, patch, or added anything else to your local overlay and need to make Portage aware of the changes so the package can be properly merged, do not use the "digest" command. Use "manifest" instead. For example:

ebuild foo-1.0.17.ebuild manifest

Digests have been dead for a long time. Please don't encourage bad practices.

This has been a December public service announcement. Thank you for flying Gentoo Air, and please enjoy the rest of your Christmas!

Here are some fast and dirty benchmarks of various gtk+ engines installed on my system, using app-benchmarks/gtkperf-0.40.

Notes on the hardware:

CPU: Athlon 64 X2 4600+
Graphics: nVidia 7600GT, DVI 1440x900 @ 60Hz
RAM: 4GB DDR2-667
Mobo: ASUS M3N78-VM

Notes on the testing environment:

OS: Gentoo Linux (duh)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.27-gentoo-r2 #3 SMP PREEMPT x86_64
nvidia-drivers: 177.82
CFLAGS: -march=athlon64 -O2 -msse3 -fomit-frame-pointer
DE: Xfce 4.4.3
- Xfwm4 with Composite enabled, effects: drop shadows & transparency
- Open applications: 1 instance each of www-client/mozilla-firefox, app-editors/gvim, xfce-extra/terminal
- Cairo: 1.6.4, compiled with glitz support. Not all engines use Cairo, but those that do should benefit from a small speed increase.

The gtk+ engines are all available in Portage. If you're not on Gentoo, look in your distribution's repositories or check here. Custom themes are noted with *. These are personal themes I've made, nothing more than simple color modifications of an existing freely available theme. No additional images are used, so rendering time should not be affected.

All tests were conducted 3 times, using a Test Round setting of 100. I picked the best score of the 3, as I was looking for best-case usage conditions. The results are ranked in order from fastest to slowest.

Engine: Mist
Theme: Mist

GtkEntry - time: 0.01
GtkComboBox - time: 0.53
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.47
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.09
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.03
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.13
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.06
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.24
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.28
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.13
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.35
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.29
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.16
---
Total time: 3.07

Engine: Xfce
Theme: Xfce

GtkEntry - time: 0.03
GtkComboBox - time: 1.12
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.50
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.06
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.04
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.14
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.07
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.06
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.27
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.17
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.27
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.35
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.31
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.16
---
Total time: 3.56

Engine: Rezlooks
Theme: Blue Ink*

GtkEntry - time: 0.07
GtkComboBox - time: 0.95
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 0.65
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.06
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.03
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.28
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.28
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.39
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.34
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.15
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.27
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.36
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.29
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.17
---
Total time: 4.31

Engine: Industrial
Theme: Industrial

GtkEntry - time: 0.08
GtkComboBox - time: 1.52
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.04
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.12
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.05
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.59
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.35
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.39
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.39
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.21
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.36
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.17
---
Total time: 5.86

Engine: Glider
Theme: Glider

GtkEntry - time: 0.04
GtkComboBox - time: 1.93
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.62
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.42
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.02
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.25
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.19
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.32
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.37
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.29
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.36
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.31
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.17
---
Total time: 6.59

Engine: Pixmap
Theme: Elegant Autumn*

GtkEntry - time: 0.09
GtkComboBox - time: 1.64
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.34
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.24
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.17
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.52
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.48
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.89
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.69
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.22
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.26
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.36
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.17
---
Total time: 7.37

Engine: Clearlooks
Theme: Glossy

GtkEntry - time: 0.08
GtkComboBox - time: 1.93
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.45
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.40
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.29
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.61
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.50
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.59
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.41
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.32
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.27
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.35
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.31
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.18
---
Total time: 7.68

Engine: Candido
Theme: Graphite Light

GtkEntry - time: 0.08
GtkComboBox - time: 2.10
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 1.86
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.17
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.26
GtkToggleButton - time: 0.63
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.53
GtkRadioButton - time: 0.60
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.48
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.25
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.28
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.36
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.29
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.17
---
Total time: 8.05

Engine: Aurora
Theme: Aurora

GtkEntry - time: 0.47
GtkComboBox - time: 3.78
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 3.50
GtkSpinButton - time: 0.96
GtkProgressBar - time: 0.31
GtkToggleButton - time: 1.53
GtkCheckButton - time: 1.29
GtkRadioButton - time: 1.66
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 0.58
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 0.46
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 0.31
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 0.38
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 0.32
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.19
---
Total time: 15.73

As you can see, the older engines are generally the fastest, with the more modern Rezlooks engine coming in close behind. Though they're generally not as attractive, the old Mist and Xfce engines turn in very respectable rendering times. The Pixmap engine actually doesn't score too well, coming in at the lower middle of the pack. This is despite many reports I found via Google that suggest it's one of the best-performing engines out there. Not so much; it's about average.

But by far the worst performing engine is Aurora. Now, to be fair, Aurora does many graphical tricks the other engines do not. It came along some time after old engines like Pixmap, Industrial, Mist, and Glider. It features animated scrollbars, gauges, and many possible styles of dropdowns and arrows. In short, it's fully loaded. Yet it also doesn't seem to be optimized; at 15.73 seconds, it's almost twice as slow as the nearest contender, Candido.

The results for the Aurora engine were so dismal that I re-ran gtkperf another 3 rounds, thinking something was amiss. Every result turned in times between 15 and 16 seconds. Clearly, Aurora isn't the engine to use if you're on old hardware.

Conclusion:

Remember, these are down and dirty benchmarks. Cherry-picking the best time out of 3 runs may not be the most fair way of measurement, but since no single result varied more than 2 seconds either way, it can be considered pretty well representative of the engine's overall capabilities.

If you're on less capable hardware, the Mist and Xfce engines will go far. If you want something prettier, stick with Rezlooks. I have several screenshots of Rezlooks-based environments in my devspace. It's quite flexible, and it's still in the top three fastest engines, despite including goodies like subtly animated progress bars and gauges.

But even on my fairly powerful workstation, newer engines like Candido and Aurora were noticeably slower, suggesting they might not be a good fit for older hardware. Clearlooks and Pixmap are middle-of-the-road choices; neither has much of an advantage. It comes down to which engine you think has prettier themes.

Me? I stick with Rezlooks. And occasionally Clearlooks (the Glossy theme makes for a good wintry desktop foundation), and very occasionally I'll find a decent Pixmap theme that's worth modding for my system. Otherwise, it's Rezlooks all the way.

I installed Ubuntu Studio 8.10 on my laptop a couple of days ago, wiping out the unused Windows Vista partition. Eh, the laptop didn't come with a recovery DVD anyway.

I know. Why Ubuntu, right?

Simply put, I didn't want to waste time trying to install audio applications that either aren't available in Gentoo, don't compile, or otherwise require excruciating configuration. I wanted an out-of-the-box setup ready to work immediately. My piano has MIDI and line out jacks, and it's about time I finally did something with 'em.

I shopped around the various specialty multimedia production distributions, and finally settled on 64 Studio and Ubuntu Studio. Haven't yet tried the former; I've just installed Ubuntu for now.

Alone among the various official Ubuntu flavors, it still uses the ugly ncurses installer. At least it worked perfectly. It correctly detected my existing Gentoo partition and left it alone.

I have some notes on the experience so far, though as I'm still waiting for my USB-midi adapter to arrive, I can't actually comment on the audio applications themselves. But first, a digression on troubleshooting Ubuntu.

Due to the complexity of the software, with all the vendor configuration, patches, package integration and the like, when problems do arise, they feel much harder to fix. Part of this is that I'm not sure what all's been installed. With Gentoo, I know exactly what's going on the box; there's nothing there ahead of time to discover. Not so with Ubuntu. Figuring out what's on there (that I don't need) is an ongoing process. That being said, when problems do arise, they're not the kind that I run into with Gentoo. I suppose my unfamiliarity with the distro contributes quite a bit to my initial ability to fix things -- what isn't a problem on Gentoo can be in Ubuntu, and vice versa. Ubuntu has solved problems I didn't have the first clue how to fix on Gentoo. By contrast, trying to fix the things I take for granted, like decent hardware acceleration everywhere, is unfamiliar turf on Ubuntu. Here be dragons. Ye be warned!

The Good

• All kinds of hardware working that I was sure I didn't even have. Apparently I actually do have a bluetooth chip, as advertised. For ten months now not a single LiveCD or distro has picked it up, so I thought they left it out when they refurbished my laptop. No need for the USB dongle.
• Working hardware that I had no idea how to make work in Gentoo. ThinkPad features like hotkeys and decent power management. Onscreen popups for backlight and sound. Only thing not working is the mute button.
• Exceedingly nice desktop integration; I generally appreciate the extra upstream patches. The "hidden" options for such things as desktop icon behavior for Xfce are made available in the Desktop dialog. Proper power options on the shutdown menus. Preconfigured audio bundles that all work together out-of-the-box? Heaven.
• Package management is generally a snap. I'm not as concerned with bloat since everything's binary. Lots of package choices, and many 3rd-party repositories that seem trusted and well-used.
• Beautiful desktop environment. Finally, a decent dark theme.
• Good documentation on the Ubuntu homepage, though the search function for both official and community docs sucks big-time. It really can't be counted on. The wiki itself is freaking weird; the generated page titles aren't so human-friendly. Takes some getting used to, as it's not as intuitive as Wikipedia.

The Bad

• No wireless networking ready out-of-the-box, though at least it doesn't ship with the bloated POS that is NetworkManager. Fortunately, wicd was an easy install.
• Slower bootup. Uses Gnome, so that's noticeably slower than my usual Xfce setup.
• In spite of some small improvements here and there to specific areas of power management, battery usage is actually a little higher overall than Gentoo.
• No real working HDAPS. Documentation is spotty, inconsistent; scattered across thinkwiki, ubuntuforums, and the internet. In fairness, this isn't working on Gentoo either, but you'd think Ubuntu would have this working, since all the other ThinkPad hardware works.
• Synaptic sucks for managing multiple installs/removes. Having to right click a million times for each package is a pain. The database is kinda slow to load. The search features needs work.
• I still miss USE flags. Having to install Ruby just to install gVim is bleah. Same for other packages.
• Manually compiling packages doesn't bear contemplation. I miss the automation Portage provides.
• Despite following the official instructions on enabling DVD playback and DVD navigation, the default player in the menu (Totem) can't actually play DVDs, failing with an error message that said "No reason." (No, really. That's what it said.) I had to go to the command line and run totem-gstreamer. Unnecessary stumbling block. Similarly, mplayer can't go through the menus, even though the appropriate libraries are installed. Mplayer was one of the suggested players to use with libdvdnav, but a quick scan of its binary doesn't indicate it was built against it. It can play the main feature, however.
• DVD playback is somewhat slower than Gentoo. So far I've tried gxine, mplayer, VLC, and totem. All exhibit more clipping and framedropping in Ubuntu than in Gentoo.
• The ubuntuwiki font is ugly. Need a way to change that without disabling custom fonts for all sites in Firefox. Yes, it hurts my eyes enough to merit inclusion here.
• Not being able to eject discs after playing them. Why doesn't the button work? Could just have been a bad session.
• No Handbrake available? Sad day.
• Right-clicking in gVim to copy text doesn't work, despite the same config files copied from Gentoo. Neither does pasting it with Ctrl-V in Firefox. Something's screwy here.

The Ugly

• Worst nonworking version of Alacarte EVER. Don't bother trying to adjust menus or move items up or down or drop items into a new subfolder. Almost nothing works.
• At boot, when the desktop tries to load, occasionally I'll get a frozen, garbled screen that repeatedly resets as X tries to restart. So much for "bulletproofX". Whatever Ubuntu developers have done to the kernel for Intel graphics, they screwed up. Odd; this X3100 chip works perfectly in Gentoo for every kernel up through 2.6.27.
• Having to spend hours tweaking the system to get something only vaguely close to my comfortable, familiar Gentoo setup. (And hoping that I don't just uninstall the whole thing after all that work!)

Will it stay? Will I completely make the move to Ubuntu Studio, at least on this laptop? Too soon to tell. But I am very, very impressed with what I see. I like it a lot. I'll know more after I've had the chance to use the audio production software in a few days.

That's right, no longer will I be writing a series of failed hardware posts. No, now I've had some successes on the hardware front. I've slowly started coming back to my usual Gentoo work. Still not all the way back yet, but I'm almost there.

Revamping the desktop

First: it was a dead motherboard, possibly also a dead PSU. The motherboard for sure didn't work; tried it with the rest of my new hardware but got nowhere. I'm not willing to risk my new hardware with a possibly faulty PSU, so I won't be doing any further testing there.

Anyway, I went to Fry's a few weeks ago and purchased an ASUS M3N78-VM motherboard. It's a microATX motherboard, so already all the slots are used up (the graphics card takes three slots, and the PCI sound card has the last). Now I have a reasonable upgrade path, as this is an AM2+ board. Phenoms and their successors are now available to me!

Even though the board does have an nVidia chipset, its storage system has a working AHCI implementation, so all my drives work just fine. Except that for some reason, the Samsung RAID array doesn't have NCQ enabled, while the single Seagate storage drive does. A minor bit of lame, but I didn't have working NCQ with sata_nv anyway. The SATA optical drive that's been gathering dust in the closet for a few months now works, too. Score for AHCI.

The BIOS is fairly limited in terms of doing anything with processor frequency or voltage at stock or lower speeds. Yes, I would have liked to undervolt the CPU to save a bit of power and heat, but unlike the MSI motherboard this one can't do that. It's only setup for overclocking, not under.

The BIOS is easy to update -- just toss the file onto a USB stick, reboot, select it from the BIOS menu. Alas, this board isn't one of the midrange/higher-end models, so it does not have ExpressGate installed -- it's funny, but I would have to use the DVD to install it, and that's designed only for Windows Vista. Yes, you read that right. If I want ExpressGate, a Linux-based operating system, I have to use the Windows Installer CD on a Windows System to install it to the hard drive. This motherboard is a bit more budget; it doesn't have onboard flash for ExpressGate.

Graphically challenged

That new ATI graphics card I liked so much? Well, it seemed to have a few problems even on the new board. Framerates were terrible; UT2004 was a constant stutter-fest, and that was with DRI enabled and working correctly. This card should have been running circles around the old nVidia 7600GT. So either the hardware was defective, or ATI's Catalyst drivers still suck assballs. Probably both, but I still sent the card in for a refund.

The motherboard has an nVidia 8200 IGP, but I decided to plug in the old 7600GT. Presto, it works! The card never went bad, after all. Was just the crap 'board it was on. So I'm now back to nVidia -- I won't be buying any ATI products in the near future, either. Also, using nVidia makes kernel configuration much simpler; no need to enable crazy stuff in the "Kernel debugging" section just to use the Catalyst drivers.

Hacking the routers

Just when I was starting to get the last of the hardware issues fixed, my router finally craps out. Really, I should have replaced it 3 months ago, when it first started flickering. I finally threw in the towel after I was power-cycling it 7+ times per day. Crappy D-Link firmware.

Bought myself an ASUS WL-500g Premium v2. Same price as the new Linksys WRT-54GL Linux-based router, but the ASUS has at least twice the hardware specs, and it's just as friendly to flashing with Linux. I should know -- it arrived earlier today, and a few hours later I had it successfully flashed with the latest DD-WRT. Used a custom mini-USB version pulled from SVN, actually, as suggested in the installation instructions.

I couldn't use the default ASUS web interface to load the flash, and I lacked a Windows computer to use their included flash tool. I ended up doing a few trial-and-error experiments to TFTP the DD-WRT firmware onto the machine. Which reminds me: I hate tftp-hpa, for the sole reason that there's no tab-completion. I expected the experience to be more shell-like? Darned retyping every command . . . and apparently I was doing it wrong with the options listed in the manpage. Ah, well. The result was the same in the end.

The last thing I needed to do was setup the print server, which was accomplished with minimal fuss. So now I have a working print server. Plugged in our printer, and now we can print from any machine in the house. Wireless printing is pretty sweet. Still have one more free USB port on the router, too. Gosh, the possibilities....

I'd run Gentoo on the router, but it seems like too much work, if it's possible at all. Besides, it's hard to beat the attractiveness of prepackaged firmware that needs next to no configuration.

I was about to toss out the old router, a D-Link DI-624 rev. E1 (apparently NewEgg sold me the European model a few years ago?). However, I discovered that D-Link released source code for it. Apparently, this crappy firmware that's required periodic resets and many, many reboots since I purchased it is actually Linux-based. D-Link had been violating the GPL for some time and only just released the source last year. No wonder they never released a single firmware update; the product was EOLed not long after I bought it.

Anyway, the thing comes with some variety of MIPS R4600 chip, and included in the source tarball is the stuff for doing a full cross-toolchain compile, ending up with a kernel and a firmware image. Internet reports via Google are a little sketchy about whether or not custom images will actually work, since I think the device only has about 2MB flash. That's probably too small, though somehow D-Link made it work. This is a fun stretch of my embedded hacking skills, at least. I'm going to make the effort to get my own firmware on the thing. Anything's gotta be more reliable than what was originally on there.

* * *

Update: I did some searching of manufacturer product pages, and I think this particular DI-624 has way more flash than I'd allowed for; the chip seems to be the 32MB variety.

Also, and this totally floored me: the router runs on Gentoo. I kid you not. Gentoo. All the source code is setup for building another Gentoo image, too. It's got Portage 2.0.51-r15, and a few of our initscripts. The rest is altered a fair amount, but not unrecognisably so.

I now have Gentoo firmware for the Atheros AR2316 SoC at the heart of the router. Time to see if I can successfully flash this MIPS critter.

Gentoo: it powers rockets, the backbone of the internet, lighting and HVAC controls (go read the GMN), and common home routers such as the DI-624 and DI-524 (same source for both.) Who knows how many other D-Link products are powered by Gentoo Linux? Only way to find out is to grab the source code from the manufacturer.

Yes, the ongoing saga of my hardware meltdown continues.

The Seasonic M12II-430W power supply I ordered finally arrived today, and oh man, is it nice. The modular cabling makes it so much easier to work inside my case, besides improving airflow since I need far fewer cables.

I threw in my RAID1 array and booted the machine up, and it ran just fine . . . for a half hour. And then it froze again. Went out to lunch and never came back.

So, since the PSU is good, the new graphics card is good (the old one is completely dead; it won't output at all), the drives are good, the outlet and power strip seem good . . . I guess the only suspect is the motherboard itself. It can't be software: I ran a few liveCDs that don't use x11-drivers/ati-drivers, and they all locked up at some point.

I thought about switching to Intel, given the excellent chipset support in Linux, but it's cheaper to just keep my existing Athlon X2 CPU, rather than buy a whole new motherboard and CPU.

I believe I'll purchase this board, the Asus M3A78-EM HDMI. Sure, it's microATX, but I only have a single dual-slot PCIe graphics card and a separate PCI sound card, so it's not like I need lots of expansion space. Another plus is that the board supports AHCI for drives, though I've read that there may be issues with AMD's AHCI implementation in SB700 chipsets. Reports are mixed, however, and there's next to no information for Linux users. Hopefully I can get it working; it'd be nice to finally use my Asus SATA DVDRW. It doesn't play nicely with sata_nv for nVidia MCP55 chipsets, so it's been gathering dust in the closet.

Any experiences ya'll have for this Asus board (or other good AMD chipsets for socket AM2/AM2+) would be appreciated.

* * *

What with all the hardware craziness, I've put myself on devaway; I don't know when I'll be able to really get any work done this month. Once I get my new hardware, assuming it works, I should be able to pick up Gentoo development where I left off.

I really don't know what I'll do if the motherboard doesn't solve the lockups. Weep quietly in a corner, perhaps. Swear off computers forever, maybe.

More updates on the constant meltdown of my workstation. Thanks to the folks who commented on this blog and on IRC -- I had some helpful suggestions and thoughts.

I managed to get rid of the graphical corruption by switching to a different graphics card. Yes, I know the same kinda corruption can occur with a bad or missing grub splashimage, but I'd been running with one for two years and no issues. Since my grub.conf doesn't really change, that wasn't the cause. So I kinda fixed one issue -- new graphics card, no framebuffer/grub corruption.

Unfortunately, the lockups continue. So the biggest issue the new purchase was supposed to fix . . . didn't. I got shafted on tax and shipping, so what should have been an $86 card turned into $101. Ouch. That's a fair bit above the $80 neighborhood that the RadeonHD 4670 is supposed to be. Still, I got a nice HIS IceQ card. I truly can't hear its fan; it's got a very nice Arctic model. It's a nice enough upgrade, but since my system still has issues it's fairly pointless.

I switched power outlets, thinking maybe it was bad wiring in the walls. No change. Tried switching NICs again. No change. Played with some BIOS settings; I noticed a couple of IRQs being shared that really didn't need to be. No change. Tried removing my sound card, since it's the only PCI device in the system. No change.

Then I tried booting a LiveCD. SliTaz, actually. It runs entirely in RAM. It worked okay for about an hour and a half. I let my system mostly idle for a few hours; when I came back, it was hardlocked and showed no sign of recovering.

Fortunately, I'd backed up all my data to a separate disk, in preparation for reinstalling. My system stayed stable just long enough to copy the data and pull the drive; it actually hardlocks on shutdown and reboot now, too.

So, since a completely different kernel and operating system didn't show any improvements, and neither did the graphics card or running without CD drives or hard disks, I figure the problem must lie with the motherboard.

Right?

To that end, I've been searching for cheap ($80) motherboards that support socket AM2/AM2+, since I plan to save some money and reuse my Athlon X2 4600+, rather than switch to Intel. Based on all the failure reports out there, I'm avoiding Gigabyte, EVGA, and ECS motherboards. ASUS has a very attractive line of M3A78 boards, usually AMD780G chipset. I'd like one with a 790GX chipset, but that's in the $150 range. The ASUS boards I've looked at are all in my price range; it's just a matter of finding one that I like. About the only requirement I have is that it uses only solid-state capacitors and power circuitry. I'm not going to touch anything that has the possibility of leaking/exploding caps.

The other major requirement is that it needs to have working AHCI mode for SATA disks. I ran into a recent Phoronix forums post that said ATI chipsets have "buggy as hell" AHCI support, which doesn't bode well. But I don't really want to go down the nVidia route either, not since I filed that bug awhile ago for the failure of sata_nv to work with optical drives on the MCP55 chipset. Any suggestions, chipset-wise?

I suppose it's not really a good time to be buying stuff from either AMD or Intel right now, given the nifty stuff coming out next month and after, but I've no time to sit around waiting. I've got stuff to do. Ebuilds to be hacked. Newletters to be sent. Docs to be written. I mean, what with the coming stabilization of baselayout-2, OpenRC, Portage-2.2 . . . you name it.