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Ubuntu CPU scaling

I ran across a good article on how to scale your processor in Ubuntu. For me this was turned on by default and it really helped my battery life on my laptop and now it is nice to know how to configure it.
Here is the link to the full page. I am going to echo the text here just in case the website becomes non-existent like so many good sites do.

CPU Scaling is a feature built into most modern (mobile) CPUs that allows them to scale up or down in how fast they run and how much energy they suck down based on demand. If you have a fairly modern mobile computer there’s a very good chance that your CPU(s) can handle frequency scaling.

Why should you care? Well, you can control this to tell you computer how much power and how fast it should allow it’s CPU(s) to operate. This can save some energy and thus battery life at the expense of a little performance – which is great for extending the use time of your laptop when it’s unplugged.

Can your CPU(s) handle scaling? There’s an easy way to find out. Open up a terminal session (Applications -> Accessories ->Terminal) and type or paste the following into it:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies

On my machine I get back

1667000 1333000 1000000

Those are in Hertz, so my machine is capable of 1.66Ghz, 1.33Ghz and 1.00 Ghz.

Now that you know your CPU(s) can handle scaling, let’s see what modes are available. In the terminal, type or paste:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors

Again, I get:

powersave ondemand userspace conservative performance

Powersave will keep the CPU constantly at the lowest frequency. Ondemand will set the CPU at the lowest frequency (in my case, 1.00Ghz) until use of the CPU increases, then it will automatically bump it up to the highest frequency (with me, 1.66Ghz). Userspace means that a different program will be used to control the CPU’s scaling. Conservative is where your CPU will go up as needed, starting at the lowest frequency, and then bumping up to the next available until it maxes out. Performance simply sets the CPU(s) at the highest available frequency and keeps it there.

The lower your frequency, the less power you use. So, if you’re bent on extending your battery life to the max, you’d want to keep your CPU(s) at their lowest frequency – but you’ll do this at the expense of computing power. In my case my 1.66Ghz processors would effectively be 1.00Ghz processors.

Now, how do you actively control this? It’s fairly easy. Right click on an empty space in your taskbar (where your applets and such things as Applications, Places and System are located) and choose “Add to panel”. From there, find the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor. Double click on this and it will appear in your taskbar. Right click on it and choose Properties and you can set various options like have it show your CPU frequency as a frequency (i.e. 1.33Ghz) or as a percentage. If you have multiple CPU’s or a dual/quad core machine you can also choose which CPU to monitor.

To configure this applet to actually allow you to control how your CPU(s) scale, you’ll have to had back to the terminal.

Type this:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

This will throw up a nifty blue screen asking you to say Yes. Do so. Then it will ask if you want to install cpufreq-selector with SUID root. Say yes. Once you’ve done this, go back to your CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor in your taskbar and left click it. You should now be presented with a bunch of options from which you can choose the one you want. You can also directly set the frequency at which your CPU(s) will run at, which can be handy if you want to scale up or down for a short bit and then manually change it again.

As you can see, I’ve got mine set to Ondemand, allowing the frequency to scale up through three different settings (1 GHz, 1.33 GHz or 1.66 GHz) as needed.

While this will take effect immediately, it will only be in effect until you reboot at which time your default settings will come back. To change the default head back into your terminal and type:

gconf-editor

From there head to apps -> gnome-power-manager -> cpufreq. Find the settings policy_ac and policy_battery and change them to whichever setting you want for the default.

For those with multiple cores or processors who happen to be a bit needy in the info department (like myself) you can add an applet for each CPU. Just add as many applets as you have CPUs and then right click on them, choose Preferences and use the drop down to choose which CPU that particular applet is monitoring.

Now you know a lot more about CPU Frequency Scaling then you may have when you started reading this article and you know how to set it on your computer.

All credit goes to arsgeek at Hubpages.
While I didn’t use the applets the whole article is very well written and has lots of information.

Pidgin & Gtalk certificate

I use Pidgin for my chat client and I also use Gtalk. Usually there is no problem with this but I use Gtalk for my old Gmail account and also for my new email address for this website hosted by Google. I started having a problem connecting to my Gtalk account @1n73r.net. The problem was conflicting security certificates. Turns out Pidgin wants to keep one certificate per server (or that is how I understand it). I was still able to connect but every time I opened Pidgin I had to click a accept button for Pidgin to know it was OK to accept the second certificate for the connection. Well thanks to Andrei Neculau I don’t have to click that accept button anymore. Google has a second Gtalk server (really just a different address that points to the same server) and Pidgin will gladly accept a new certificate for this second connection. If you are having the same problem just set up one of your Gtalk accounts to point to talk.l.google.com on the advance tab of the account and you never have to worry about that conflicting certificate again.
Any other Pidgin hacks/tweaks you have just leave them in the comments. I love learning new things.

How to set an external display as primary in Windows Vista

I posted this on my work’s wiki but I wanted to post it here so I can remember how to do it for later.

If you have your external display plugged into your laptop push Win+X to bring up the Windows Mobility Center. Then click on the Connect display button.

This will bring up the New Display Detected screen.

With that window open select “Show my desktop on the external display only” and hit ok.

Your laptop monitor should turn off and the external display will show your start menu and anything else you had open on the laptop.

Now right click on the desktop and go to personalize.

Then go to Display settings and select “Extend the desktop onto this monitor”

Go here for more information.
http://msthings.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!BFE88543FF6C8C5F!218.entry

Let me know if you have any Vista tips in the comments.

You can’t hide from RSS feeds

It has been fun over the past few years to see stories that have been pulled from websites for various reasons. The really fun part is the fact that using RSS feeds to read stories instead of going to the website allows me to see even the stories that were taken down.
The latest one I found interesting had to do with Apple’s new ipod nano. Someone seems to have taken offense to the story though because within 3 hours of the story being posted, it was gone. I really can’t imagine who would have told them to take it down…
Anyway, here is a screenshot of what the story was about.

On another note about the new iPod nanos. It appears they changed physically how the device looks and also how the software looks.

I must say, it sure does look like another player that I have seen before. (both software and hardware)

Anyway, just thought I would encourage people to use RSS feeds to allow them to read the whole internet. Even the stories that get taken down.

Remote assistance auto accept for Windows XP

I use remote assistance on a almost daily basis at my work. It is a built in tool in Windows that allows me to remotely control a users computer without kicking them off of the machine (like remote desktop does). One thing it did not do was let me take control if the user was not at their desk. The user must click two windows when going remote with them. First they must click to allow you to share their screen, and second they must click a button to allow you to take control. I have searched and found a few VB scripts that allow me to go remote without needing the user to click accept but today I just ran across something even more useful. The ability to go remote without the user there and without needing to use a special tool. Only problem is I have to edit a file on their local machine. I may play around with this some more in the future but for now I thought I would share it with everyone just so others can enjoy this ability.

First the file you need to edit is found on the computer you are trying to take control of at C:\windows\pchealth\HelpCtr\System\Remote @ssistance\helpeeaccept.htm. Open the file with notepad, or better yet Notepad++, and edit the following lines.

btnAccept.disabled = false;
btnDecline.disabled = false;
btnDecline.focus();

to this

btnAccept.disabled = false;
btnDecline.disabled = false;
btnDecline.focus();
DoAccept();

Next, open the TakeControlMsgs.htm and find the following lines:

idExpert1.innerText = vArgs[0];
idExpert2.innerText = vArgs[0];
idExpert3.innerText = vArgs[0];

Then just add these two lines right after

// Added to allow take remote control of PC
onClickHandler(0)

That’s it! now the next time you go remote with that machine it will auto accept for you to view the screen and also auto accept when you click “Take control”.
Because remote assistance is different in Vista this doesn’t work however. If anyone knows of a way to use remote assistance in Vista without user interaction please let me know in the comments.

How-to set wallpaper image before login in Windows XP

Open up the registry and browse to:

HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Desktop\

edit the Wallpaper key to point to where ever you have your wallpaper stored (eg. c:\windows\wallpaper.bmp). The file needs to be a .bmp to show up but that is all you should need to do.
After a restart the background will show up behind the login window assuming you are not using the welcome screen.
If a user logs in and then logs out their wallpaper will show up instead. But this is great to keep things looking the same when computers are restarted often.

How to: Menu transparancy in Compiz-fusion

I never liked that Compiz-fusion didn’t have a transparent menu setting by default. Luckily people on the internet are smart. Well, some of them. Ryan Paul (I have no idea who he is) posted a article on how to add the transparency I was looking for.

In order to set up menu transparency, users will need the Compiz Config Settings Manager, which can be acquired on Ubuntu by installing the compizconfig-settings-manager package. Users can launch the utility from the command line or from the GNOME Preferences menu. The settings manager contains a number of tiles that provide access to various plugins and features included in Commpiz. To set menu transparency, select the General Options tile and navigate to the Opacity Settings tab. Expand the Window Opacities section and click the Add button. A small dialog window will open and prompt for window specification and the desired opacity.

In the Opacity Windows text field, you have to input a pipe-separated list of window types to which you want to apply the transparency. I use the following string:

Tooltip | Menu | PopupMenu | DropdownMenu

Then I set the Opacity Window Values field to 90 to indicate that windows of the previously specified types should be 90 percent opaque and 10 percent transparent.

That is all it took. I ended up making my menu’s 20% transparent but that is all it took. His post also shows how you can set up conditional transparency for specific programs (he uses pidgin as an example).  Have fun with that little tip.

Browser speed results

I watched the Apple keynote yesterday and I was not impressed. That is not the point of this post though. I wanted to do my own tests on browsers and see for myself which would be the fastest (since Steve claimed Safari was the fastest). I tested Opera 9.21, Safari 3.0, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2.0.0.4 (no Add-ons), Firefox with fasterfox 2.0.0 enabled, and Firefox 3 nightly build (alpha 6) and I used WebWait to conduct my tests. All results were the average of 5 loads with 60 seconds wait time between refreshes. I tested by loading Microsoft.com, Apple.com, GetFireFox.com, Digg.com, and Slashdot.org. Before each test I made sure that all cookies and cache was erased and that the browsers were as freshly installed as possible. (with a few of the browsers they were fresh installs). Here were the results I found.

This is the test results I found. I did not know which browser would win and I really did not care (It won’t stop me from using FireFox). If you do not believe my test results please test it yourself on your own computer. I ran all of these tests on a Windows XP machine with a P4 HT 3.2 with 1 GB of ram. The internet connection is at my work (more bandwidth than I know) and all tests were done within the same 4 hour block so all traffic on the network should be about the same. Leave a comment with how you feel about browser wars or the results I found.

Windows workstation, server, firewall services

So at my work we have had problems with our HP laptops. We have recently switched from IBM laptops to HP laptops and have had nothing but problems with our newest model the nc8430. When we first started to deploy these laptops we would get what was known as the “svchost” problem. The customer would get an error right when their computer started and it would have some information that the svchost.exe process failed. This would sometimes cause the whole computer to lock up and sometimes it would be fine and they would just have to click “OK”. Our fix for this problem was to re-image the computer with a new image we had made and we just did that for every computer that came our way with this problem. A little time went by and we found out the svchost that was crashing was related to windows updates. Every first Tuesday of the month we would have more computers come in with this same problem. Our solution has still been to re-image the computer.

Lately, we have had computers that have services crashing. We first started noticing it when customers did not have sound on the computer. Of course this is what our customers noticed first. We soon realized that the computer also would sometimes not have the Windows Time service running. Through much Google searching and experimenting we found out that the computers would loose audio when the Server service would crash. This usually would then crash the Workstation service and in turn crash the Windows Firewall\Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service. When we would try to start these services again we usually received a Error 5: Access Denied. It didn’t matter if we were logged in as a local administrator or the user of the computer. We suspected it was a problem with our domain but when we took the computer off of the domain it still would not work.

After 9 hours on the phone with Microsoft and 3 more images (one built from pre-SP2) we found the solution.

Symantec Norton AntiVirus! The version of Symantec we were running on all of the machines with the problem was 10.1.0.396. We uninstalled that version and installed 10.2 (really 10.1.5.5000 in XP and 10.2 in Vista) and all of our problems have gone away. I am making this post for anyone that is having the same problem. I have found countless forums with this issue and even a few sites that had other fixes for the problem (their issue was other software). I am making this post so hopefully Google will lead a few poor souls with the same problem this way and they can save themselves some time in trying to solve one of these two issues.

If this helped you out feel free to leave a comment below.

*Update* Looks like the problem came back. I am still working with Microsoft but for now updating to the latest version of Norton may only be a temporary fix. I am still working on the problem and will update this whenever we find the solution.

*Update#2* Microsoft contacted me last week with a fix for the problem. The article about the problem can be found here and the actual download for the fix is here. The best part is I have seen these steps before and they didn’t fix all of our problems so we ignored them. The upgraded Norton along with this patch is what makes all of our problems go away. Microsoft sent me this link on May 2 but the article was “last reviewed” on April 25th (exactly 1 week before). I asked our support tech on May 3rd if the article was just created and he said it was created on April 3rd. The article had been changed! The article also says it is at version 2.0 right now but the only thing that was changed was the “last review” date. I asked our support tech about this and he said if it was revised it would have 2 dates, one showing the the created date and one showing the revision date.

Either way, our problem is now fixed (at least it has been for a little over a week now). It looks like Microsoft created this patch just because of our 10 hour phone conversation and emails.

*Update#3* Looks like there is more to this little problem.  I noticed the patch that was given to us is now part of “critical updates” for Windows but it is a bit modified.  The version that is going out through updates is 3.0 and not 2.0 like we were given previously.  I found some great information over at the WSUS Product team blog.  Check out that link for the files you need for a complete fix of this problem.

Television resolution and the human eye

Audioholics had a interesting article about 1080p resolution and how the human eye can/can’t see that well.  There were some really interesting points on how human eye site is measured and what that means for television resolution.  A few points I got out of the article were:

• 20/20 vision means that you can read the eye chart (Snellen chart) from the same distance as average people, but 20/10 means you can read from 20 feet what the average person has to be 10 feet to read.
• A movie theater screen subtends a viewing angle of 30 degrees or more.
• The resolution of our eyes is 12 vertical lines per arc angle (one line per arcminute for 20/20 acuity) times 2.
• You can find the degree of your field of view your TV fills your eye’s by using the formula tangent x (half the subtended angle) = opposite side length (1/2 TV’s horizontal width in feet) ÷ adjacent length (distance you are from the TV) and multiplied by 2 (because your TV is twice as wide as the length we used).
• You can then find the resolution you can see by taking the degree of view x 2 x 12 (or whatever vertical lines your eyes can see).  This number will give you how many pixels you can see from the distance you are sitting (in the example it was 672).  This means that if they had a 720p 50″ TV and they sat 8′ away they still would not be able to see 1 pixel let alone if they had a 1080p TV.
• The source of the video is still what matters most in your viewing pleasure.

I found it very interesting and is a great argument against upgrading just for the sake of having a 1080p television.