Arrived back in Washington in time to take care of serial sick grandkids, in between looking at mysterious freeze-ups in a client’s HPC cluster (nothing new–it has been an issue through several OS upgrades, an elusive will-o-the-wisp that has existed since $CLIENT == $WORK -> TRUE) and exploring new Linux tools.  New to me, anyway.  Fired up GKrellm, the Linux performance monitor.  Looks much like the old perfmeter tool that has been in Solaris since the OpenWindows days.

Beginning to settle in and get comfortable with Ubuntu 9.10, which has lots of subtle improvements over 8.10, which we’ve used since late 2008. Judy’s workstation is still at 9.04, as I haven’t had time to work out some upgrade issues that need tweaking on the upgrade. Hers is 64-bit, so there are some other issues there, too. We recently upgraded the HP-Compaq C714NR laptop to 2GB of RAM, which really makes a difference in performance, but not quite ready to brave the 64-bit issue with all the wireless issues we’ve had over the years. The Gnome Network Manager is nearly flawless, and gets us on wireless networks painlessly, at least since we resolved the cantankerous Broadcom 4311 driver problems.  Best of all, if it detects a strong network you already have configured, it simply and automatically connects. We still have a bit of a kludge in the wireless driver arena, as we first let the b43 driver load, get the usual “you must update your firmware” message, then run a startup script to unload b43 and load the Broadcom driver, after which all is well. Hmm, time to go look at the firmware issue, as long as we don’t have a road trip planned for almost a month.  I did install b43-fwcutter and fiddle with this earlier, but without much success.  Sometimes us old hardware hackers just need a system that works, to get on with the revenue-producing work, that  doesn’t involve endless tweaking of drivers and firmware.