MariaDB is a fork of MySQL, which is true open source and community
maintained. MariaDB is a binary drop in replacement for MySQL. It includes
the XtraDB storage engine as a replacement for InnoDB. Its lead developer is
Michael Widenius (also known as “Monty”), the founder of MySQL.
Recently, many popular Linux distributions replaced MySQL with MariaDB as
default database server. Fedora version => 19, Archlinux and
OpenSuse. Moreover Wikipedia moved to MariaDB and Mozilla also uses MariaDB.
Famous distributions often used in server environments such as Debian and
Centos have not replaced MySQL with MariaDB yet, but they’ll probaly soon
migrate as well.
Why switch to MariaDB
Well, MySQL development has basically stopped, since Oracle acquired MySQL,
whereas the MariaDB development is progessing at full speed.
Performance and licensing are the often the most predominant reasons to make a
switch from MySQL to MariaDB.
Regarding performance - here is what Wikipedia experienced, when they compared
MariaDB to the Facebook fork of MySQL 5.1.
Many query types were 4-15% faster with MariaDB 5.5.30 under production load, a few were 5% slower, and nothing appeared aberrant beyond those bounds.
Install MariaDB on Debian Wheezy
MariaDB packages are not yet available in official Debian repositories. MariaDB
provides repositories for almost every popular os here:
The libmysqlclient18=5.5.30-mariadb1~wheezy is needed as a work-around to this
bug.
This should result is something like this…
123456789101112131415
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libaio1 libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl libhtml-template-perl libmariadbclient18 libnet-daemon-perl libplrpc-perl mariadb-client-5.5
mariadb-client-core-5.5 mariadb-common mariadb-server-core-5.5 mysql-common psmisc
Suggested packages:
libipc-sharedcache-perl tinyca mailx mariadb-test
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libaio1 libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl libhtml-template-perl libmariadbclient18 libmysqlclient18 libnet-daemon-perl libplrpc-perl
mariadb-client-5.5 mariadb-client-core-5.5 mariadb-common mariadb-server-5.5 mariadb-server-core-5.5 mysql-common psmisc
0 upgraded, 15 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 32.3 MB of archives.
After this operation, 111 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
If you are upgrading from Lion to Mountain Lion, then tere’s no need to visit a
store and fetch a box, and install a bunch of discs. Just click the Mac App
Store icon on your Mac. Buy OS X Mountain Lion. And your Mac does the rest.
OnyX is an utility for Mac OS X which allows you to run system maintenance, to
configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, QuickTime, Safari, Mail,
iTunes, login window, Spotlight, and many of Apple’s applications, to delete
caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become
cumbersome, and more.
If you are tired of applications launching automatically when you start your Mac, then you can
actually remove those Startup items from launching and slow down your performance.
Startup items are quite easy to remove with a few clicks and tweaks in the System Preferences.
Navigate to System Preferences > Users & Groups. Now select you click your username, and then click on the Login Items tab.
Here you are able to see all items launched at startup.
This easy little guide will help you with simple optimization tips for speeding
up Ubuntu (12.04, 12.10, and 13.04) and other Ubuntu-based systems such as Linux
Mint. The tips come in very handy for those using older computers with low RAM
who need to boost their computer for better speed and performance and if you are
just want a really fast and snappy computer on some regular hardware.
Removing Ubuntu One client
Saves >100 MB ram.
The following steps can be followed to completely remove the Ubuntu One client
software.
Ubuntu use the relatime flag for updating file metadata when files are accessed.
All these updates involve writes to the disk. We can avoid this with the
noatime and nodiratime parameters. This means that access time to files and
directories won’t be tracked at all.
Use tmpfs for /tmp and /var etc.
Add a section like this tmpfs section to /etc/fstab
Move browser profile to memory using Profile-sync-daemon
Profile-sync-daemon
(psd) is a diminutive
pseudo-daemon designed to manage your browser’s profile in tmpfs and to
periodically sync it back to your physical disc (HDD/SSD). This is accomplished
via a symlinking step and an innovative use of rsync to maintain back-up and
synchronization between the two. One of the major design goals of psd is a
completely transparent user experience.
Running this daemon is beneficial for two reasons:
* Reduced wear to physical discs
* Speed
Adjust /etc/psd.conf to match your setup and then restart the
Profile-sync-daemon. Your browser(s) needs to be closed before restart of the
Profile-sync-daemon.
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sudo /etc/init.d/psd restart
Remove orphaned libraries
Over time most Ubuntu/Debian installations acquire packages which are no longer
required - they’ve just been pulled in to satisfy dependencies of software
you’ve since removed - deborphan package is probably the simplest way to get rid
of orphaned and unused packages.
First do a dry-run and check that everything is good to go.
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bleachbit -p deepscan.*
and then do the real one
1
bleachbit -c deepscan.*
Disable unnecessary services and applications
Use BUM, which is a runlevel configuration tool with GUI that allows Ubuntu
users to edit and configure init services that are started when the system is
booting up or restarting. With this tool, you will be displayed with all
running and disabled services in which you can turn them on/off.
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sudo apt-get install bum
sudo bum
To remove applications from startup go to Dash > and type Startup Applications.
Disable automatic startup of any services that are not needed (or even remove
the package completely).
Increases performance using zRam
zRam is a module of the Linux kernel. It
was previously called “compcache”. zRam increases performance by avoiding paging
on disk and instead uses a compressed block device in RAM in which paging takes
place until it is necessary to use the swap space on the hard disk drive. Since
using RAM is faster than using disks, zRam allows Linux to make more use of RAM
when swapping/paging is required, especially on older computers with less RAM
installed.
Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system used by many
sites around. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by
caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data
source (such as a database or API) must be read. Memcached runs on Unix, Linux,
Windows and Mac OS X.
The memcached gem requires the following
development libraries to be installed
You may need to quickly switch between user-agent strings on the fly - when
developing websites that need to work on both mobile browsers and desktop
browsers user-agent switcing is a must-have.
And some times you’ll expirence some archaic site blocking you because you’re
not using Netscape or Internet Explorer (in an ancient version e.g. version 6).
Chrome got a built-in user-agent switcher. All you need to do is to open the
developer tools panel (use Ctrl+Shift+I shortcut) and click the wrench
button (lower right corner) and click Overrides, and enable override user
agent and elect the browser or device you want to emulate and reload the page.
There is user-agent switchers and methods available for most browsers:
Microsoft Office 2010 is the most recent version of the Microsoft Office
productivity suite. Formerly known as Office 14 in the initial stages of
its beta cycle, it was released to customers in 2010.
This howto assume that you got an ISO image of the installation media.
If you are on Debian/Ubuntu you can install wine, winetricks, and winbind using
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sudo apt-get install wine1.5 winetricks winbind
In order to install you’ll need the following native Microsoft Windows libraries (dll files)
Recently I helped a photographer to backup a large photo collection (several
terabytes) from a Western Digital (WD) personal NAS
MyBook Live.
The My Book Live Edition
NAS was released by
Western Digital in 2011. They range in storage capacity from 1 to 4 TB. My Book
Live features a 1 GHz ARM processor, 256 MB of RAM, and 1000 Mbit/s ethernet
connectivity. Contrary to previous My Book Live versions it now features a
fully fledged Debian linux distribution, whichs makes
the My Book Live easy to customize and adapt to different needs.
Backup your My Book Live to Amazon S3 and Glacier
This assumes that you got SSH access to your My Book Live. If you haven’t got
SSH, then do the following to enable SSH access.
Enable SSH via hidden menu on WD My Book Live
Go to http://mybooklive/UI/ssh (case sensitive)
replace “mybooklive” if you have renamed your My Book Live to something else,
or replace it with its IP address. It’s a hidden UI menu to enable SSH.
Now you are able to ssh to your My Book Live via
putty or another ssh
client.
Netflix is finally working on Linux - not native, but with a patched Wine build,
you can now use Netflix under Linux.
For those who are not familiar with Netflix, it is an American provider of
on-demand Internet streaming media available to both North and South America,
the Caribbean, United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland.
The Netflix Desktop package installs all of the components necessary to run Netflix
Watch Instantly under Wine, including the Windows version of Mozilla Firefox and
Microsoft Silverlight v4. The package also includes some convience
settings to integrate Netflix into Firefox in such a way that everything feels
like a native application.
Run Netflix
You can launch the Netflix Desktop web app through desktop Dash menu.
The Netflix Desktop application runs in full screen, but you can exit full
screen mode by pressing F11 (just like any other browser).
Use it for websites that require Silverlight / PlayReady DRM
Start the Netflix Desktop web app and then press F11 (to exit full screen mode),
then press ALT + v and then the menu occurs, now enable the Menu Bar and
Navigation Toolbar.
Heroku is quite popular for lightweight webservice and like projects. Until
recently Heroku only offered PostgreSQL-based database backend providers, but now Heroku
offers a quite large range of database backend providers; among them Amazon RDS.
This is a short run-down on how I managed to get a Heroku-based application to
connect to a Amazon RDS-based database.
Install the Amazon RDS command line tools
$ sudo apt-get install rdscli
Create a AWS Credential File (~/.aws/AwsCredentials.properties)
Create a RDS db in the us-east region (if not run in this region, Heroku isn’t able to connect to it)