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Thursday, August 30, 2001
Read By 7,000 Linux Enthusiasts Weekly!TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
Review of Checkpoint FW-1 on Linux
KOffice Rolls Out
Spot the Bugs, Win Some Loot
Corel to Sell Linux Operating System Unit3) Linux Resources
How to create a Linux-based network of computers for peanuts
How to View MSWord Documents in Linux
UNIXHelp for Users
Free SuSE CD
Minimal Perl4) App o’ the week
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1) Sean’s Notes
Last week we took a look at the Load Average and the top utility as a way to spot CPU hogs.
http://www.ertw.com/~sean/newsletter/August+23%2C+2001
This week, it’s time to look at the memory situation. A quick snapshot can be called up with the “free” command. I’ve used -m to report in megabytes, and trimmed some uninteresting data to make it fit.
free -m
total used free buffers cachedMem: 139 131 8 2 74 -/+ buffers/cache: 55 84 Swap: 133 26 106
The first line deals in physical memory. There is 139M of memory in this system, and 131M are used, leaving 8M free. Is this system starved for memory? No – the answer lies in the the last two columns. 2M is taken up for disk buffers, and the OS has cached 74M of data in memory. These last two figures are dynamic, in that Linux will take memory away from them when applications need it. This way, all the memory is put to use in some form or another.
The answer to “how much memory are my applications using” is found in line two. It gives the used/free figures without the buffers and cache calculations. So, I’m using 55M of memory (131-2-74), and 84M is free (8+2+74).
Line three deals with swap. Swap is memory that has been temporarily stored on disk to free it up for other uses. Here, I’ve got 133M of swap, and am using 26M. Even though memory is free, the operating system will keep a certain amount of swap in use, such as memory that hasn’t been touched in a long time, and some space just to keep track of the swap itself.
Two big indicators of a memory problem will be the free RAM not including buffers (84M) getting low, and the used swap space (26M) getting high. Once you start digging into swap, your performance will suffer. You’ll also be able to hear the drives churning (if the machine is close).
The quickest way to find out who’s taking up all that memory is, again, with top. Fire up top
top
Then, tell it to sort by memory usage with the capital M key.
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE %MEM TIME COMMAND 16765 fred 14 0 190M 98M 64 70.7 0:11 memsucker
here, you can see that a process called memsucker is taking up 70.7% of the memory… The size column says that 190M have been allocated to this process.
Some applications leak memory, ie they allocate it, but never free it. These programs will benefit from being killed and restarted every so often.
Some applications are naturally memory intensive, in which case you may want to temporarily increase the size of the swap for the duration of the job. If it is a process that runs often, such as a database, you’ll want to look at increasing the size of physical RAM, or getting other apps off that box.
Keeping on top of the memory situation is critical to the smooth functioning of your machines. Get a feel for what gets used in normal operation so that you know when it’s time to add some more RAM or take other action.
Long live the Penguin,
Sean mailto:swalberg@brainbuzz.com
2) Linux News
Review of Checkpoint FW-1 on Linux
“Check Point FireWall-1 is the 800-pound gorilla of the commercial firewall industry. Check Point Software Technologies has ported its popular, sophisticated and relatively easy-to-administer firewall to the Linux platform. FireWall-1 is further enhanced with integrated VPN functionality that’s easy to deploy and manage. Such integration sets Check Point apart from both commercial Linux firewall suites and open source security alternatives.”
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2806277 ,00.html
KOffice Rolls Out
Congrats to the KDE crew on releasing KOffice 1.1. It’s a free integrated office suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, and more! Kivio, the Visio-like tool, looks especially interesting.
http://dot.kde.org/999051134/
Spot the Bugs, Win Some Loot
Ximian, packager of all things GNOME, are nearing completion of the Evolution mail reader. They’re asking for your help in finding bugs, prizes range from $100 to a Palm V. There are different categories, so even if you only submit one bug, you could still be a winner!
http://www.ximian.com/devzone/projects/evolution-devel.html
Corel to Sell Linux Operating System Unit
Xandros Corp has bought Corel’s Linux division for around $2M US, and 5% stake in the company. I wish Xandros more luck than befell Corel… It’s a tough market, and people are already well established.
http://www.canoe.ca/MoneyNewsTechnology/aug29_corellinux-cp.html
3) Linux Resources
How to create a Linux-based network of computers for peanuts
So, you know that an old computer can be revitalized with Linux. But just how old can that box be? For how cheap can you build a reliable network? You’d be surprised! This article is the first part in a series that looks at how to set up a complete network of old computers, but still have the performance of a new machine.
http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/0823.xterminal.html
How to View MSWord Documents in Linux
Whenever someone emails me a .doc file, I have to fire up Star Office to read it. Kind of a pain; I’d prefer something smaller that I can tell PINE to associate with .DOC and save a lot of time. Luckily, I was able to find some good alternatives here.
http://www.varlinux.org/article.php?sid12
UNIXHelp for Users
Courtesy of the University of Edinburgh, this link has helpful advice on how to perform tasks from email to shell commands. It even has tables to help those converting from DOS and VMS!
http://www.dorsai.org/help/unix/UNIXhelp/index.html
Free SuSE CD
Grab yourself a free SuSE evaluation CD! Just tell them where to ship it, and wait by your mailbox.
http://www.suse.com/cgi-bin/free_eval.pl
Minimal Perl
So, you think you want to learn Perl, but the learning curve is intimidating. The “Minimal Perl” approach teaches a subset of Perl that is designed to get the job done, rather than cutting elegant code. Once you figure all that out, you can get into the more esoteric parts of the language, or just stop there. This link points to a slideshow – it’s a gzipped postscript document, so after downloading it, gunzip it, then use “gv” to view it.
http://www.consultix-inc.com/downloads/minperl_1a.ps.gz
4) App o’ the week
H.323 is a standard used in voice and video conferencing systems such as VOIP. The Open H.323 project was formed to create an H.323 stack for Linux. Along with the main project are side projects to create gatekeepers and clients.
http://www.openh323.org/
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