Firefox vs Swiftfox

This is what I did:
firefox & swiftfox
After a few seconds the Swiftfox window showed up. After some more seconds, I got a warning: Firefox is already running and ...

That speaks for itself, doesn't it?

(Sorry I don't include some screenshots, It is already late and I am drowsy)

Swappiness

There is something that has a powerful effect on your computer speed and that is the memory.
In this kind-of-old (hope it doesn't get angry) computer I have 250 Mb of physical memory. That is pretty little if you want to run some heavy apps.

Fortunately, Linux relies on a partition of your disk called "swap". There, all the memory pages that go to idle state are stored until they are needed again. This is very useful since it lets your physical memory concentrate on what is in use.

Unfortunately, there is a problem. You can use some resource once and then leave it and then use it again and so. This makes the system swap this resource and then take it back to memory and swap it again and so making your applications go slower.

There is a fix to this since you can modify the swappiness of the system (this is, how much memory you want to swap). Swappiness could have a value from 0 (no swap) to 100 (swap a lot). Default is 60. You can modify this by editing the file /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. If you want to store this behaviour permanently, you then need to add a line to your /etc/sysctl.conf:

vm.swappiness = value

Then, restart or run:

sysctl -w vm.swappiness=value

For me, the value that works best is 50 but I am thinking about changing it to 40 and see what happens. If you want to find out yours, you can try and start those apps you use frequently, run htop and see how much memory is the system using. If there is a lot of memory being used, it'll be better to have a large swappiness value. If not, you are free to set a lower value.

Slooooooooow

Those who use DEs like KDE or Gnome and even Enlightenment, will find that days after configuring the computer, it becomes slow. This could be due to lots of reasons. One of them is the "Remember session" option. There could be apps you start or other program start and they will be initiated the next time you log in.

It is very good for you and your computer not to have this option enabled. If you want something to start at login, just add add it up to your xsession file or your .kde/Autostart/ folder (obviously for those with kde 3.x, if you use something else, just go and google it).

Now, if you want to start something from the beginning (no login required), here is how.

Hope that was useful to you all.

L337

L337 5uX

Good idea: Recent documents in your Desktop

Well. I have a machine with Ubuntu 8.10 (LTS who knows what it means (wkwim)) with kde 3.5.10.

It seemed very cool to have those recent documents very accessible so I thought to have them in my Desktop. Anyway it was empty then.

So the solution I came up with was:

(logged out using kde)

cd ~
rm -Rf Desktop
ln -s /home/<user>/.kde/share/apps/RecentDocuments Desktop

And that's all. You will have those things you are working on directly on your Desktop.
I don't really know if you have to write all the absolute path in the ln and I am too lazy to try something else.

Introducing PC con ojos

Hi everyone, I will write those things I manage to do in my machine or others.

Hope this stuff will be useful to you all.

If you want t;o read my non-technical blog, I strongly recommend you to go to adan-ova.blogspot.com.