A ghost process eating up all RAM?

After a “find” operation spanning the entire disk, I suddenly had System Monitor (2.28.0 of Fedora 12) telling me that 11.5 GB out of the existing 16 GB were used up, and the applet said 75% was “in use by programs”. Really. Virtually nothing was running on the system. Just to be sure, I tried [...]

ionice. Only that made upgrading worth it.

Copying gigabytes of disk can get the system sluggish. On Linux, the solution is so simple. If process 18898 happens to take control of your disk, just go: ionice -c 3 -p 18898 And you have your computer back. “-c 3″ means class 3, which is idle class. In other words, take the disk when [...]

Installing .so libraries on a 64-bit Fedora with yum

A short note about installing libraries on an Intel 64 bit machine (Fedora 12 in my case). It all starts with a short conversation like this one: [root@short Downloads]# rpm -i VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.2_56127_fedora12-1.x86_64.rpm error: Failed dependencies:     libQtGui.so.4()(64bit) is needed by VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.2_56127_fedora12-1.x86_64     libQtOpenGL.so.4()(64bit) is needed by VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.2_56127_fedora12-1.x86_64 THE WRONG THING TO DO IS: [root@short Downloads]# [...]

DCM loses lock on Virtex-4: It’s all about auto calibration

The whole story began when I decided to be kind enough to tell the Xilinx tools (ISE 9.2 in my case) that the Virtex-4 I’m targeting is a grown-up. Stepping 2, to be precise. I added CONFIG STEPPING = “2″; to the UCF file. It must have been one of those moments where I believed [...]

500 days: The uptime never reached

I know it’s stupid, but there’s something cool about very long uptimes. I think it begins when the uptime reaches 100 days: You think twice before rebooting your Linux machine: Is it really necessary? The truth is that without really paying attention to it, my Linux box approached 500 days. I noticed that, because I [...]