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 nobody else [...]

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]# yum install libQtGui.so.4
because it will install the [...]

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 that the [...]

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 wanted [...]