Crux diary

[hazel]

Here are some benchmark speed tests I did with OpenOffice in Crux:

Time to load Office wrapper: 7-8 sec
Time to load openWrite/openCalc from wrapper: 7-8 sec
Time to load openWrite/openCalc from command line: 12 sec
Time to load openWrite from openCalc: 5 sec.

That is bloody amazing! I remember that in Ubuntu it took well over half a minute to load openWrite. So I gave it up and used abiword and gnumeric instead. For the kind of simple spreadsheets that I use, gnumeric is as good as openCalc, but abiword is definitely not a patch on openWrite.

I can see why Crux is fast: it doesn't have 20 different daemons running by default in the background. I'm curious to know if one gets similar results on Arch, which has a similar philosophy. Any Arch fans out there want to do the same test?

[Dapper Dan]

hazel, I love Gnumeric and have been using it for years on many boxes! It is almost impossible to crash!

[reed9]

I haven't timed it, but unofficially, openoffice opens comparably fast under Arch.

Arch also only runs daemons you explicitly tell it to run, I think the same way as in Crux. In Arch, there's a daemons array in /etc/rc.conf - I think Crux calls it services?

I'm running pekwm with Arch on my Dell Mini 9, and unless I have firefox open, memory consumption is usually around 90 MB. That's with a fair number of daemons loading, wicd, openssh, openntpd, slim login manager, hal, and a couple others I can't recall right now.

[hazel]

Spent the whole of yesterday installing cups and associated programs (ghostscript, foomatic-filters, hpijs) and getting it to work. Initially I couldn't print anything; no matter what type of file I tried, I always got the same error: "Application/xxx not supported". I googled and found that this is a common problem but without a specific solution. Some people got round it by commenting out part of their /etc/cups/mime.convs file (unfortunately they didn't say which part); others had to remove the whole caboodle and reinstall.

I didn't want to do that for obvious reasons so I copied the mime.convs file from Debian. I have never had any problems printing in that system. And it worked. The errors disappeared. Of course I still had to set up my printer. That meant recompiling the kernel to get an lp module to load. And I learned that you don't define a printer yourself because you'll never get the address right; you let cups find the printer for you, which it will do once lp is loaded.

Today I tried again and discovered that now cups works with the original Crux mime.convs file as well as with the Debian one. So why didn't it yesterday? Computers are not logical.