OpenSuse 12.3 - Review - Very good performance

The first thing that I note is faster booting. It takes about 15 secs, with previous version it was about 45 secs. Second thing is better performance. Desktop is very responsive and takes lesser memory. As compared to Ubuntu 12.04 with KDE 4.10, it consumes about 300MB less RAM in OpenSuse on my office laptop.

Installation

I installed it on 2 different variants on 2 different laptops, first one is Dell Vostro- Core i5 2nd generation,4GB ram and second is Compaq CQ-62 AMD Phenom X4, 6GB ram. I installed KDE live on AMD one and Mango Linux on intel one. Mango Linux a OpenSuse derivative developed and maintained by me, contains all additional stuff that is needed after installing OpenSuse, like Google chrome, flash, google earth, vlc, etc... and updates. Installation is no different from previous version. Installation went smooth without any issue.

Hardware support

On both the laptops all the device are detected and are working well. For the first time in KDE bluetooth is working, although not perfectly, I'm not able to receive files via bluetooth. Previously nothing was working for bluetooth using KDE, so I've to use Blueman to share files over bluetooth. I had an issue with wifi on Dell laptop using Ubuntu 12.04, that even with fast internet connection, pages open very slow, so I’ve to use cable for internet. I did not faced such issues with OpenSuse/Mango Linux. I have dual graphics in Compaq laptop first one is Radeon 45XX series one IGP and another is 1Gb 5520 addon graphics cards. IGP belongs to legacy series of catalyst driver and discrete belongs to new catalyst, so I cannot install AMD proprietary drivers, as both cannot be installed together, so I’m open source driver. To disable discrete graphic driver at boot I’m following this thread.

Software

OpenSuse12.3 come with kernel 3.7.10, KDE 4.10.0, Gnome 3.6, LibreOffice 3.6. Latest version of LibreOffice is release 4.0, which release after feature freeze hence not included in default software selection, but is available in a separate repo. I'm use KDE as default desktop environment. I did not find any major issue with it, it is very smooth and stable. I used KDE 4.10 with Ubuntu 12.04, where is faced few crashes and performance was not very good, which did not happen in this case. OpenSuse has reputation of providing best KDE desktop experience, it is feel more polished than previous version. Overall performance is far better than Ubuntu 12.04 and also better than 12.2. The major change in default software selection is MariaDb in place of MySql.

Conclusion

In this release performance is improved a lot, from booting to opening applications and doing day to day tasks. It takes 15 secs to boot with default applications/services,which is very good. In VMWare player it takes about 8 secs. Faster booting matters a lot, although it is Linux, you don't need to reboot often as compared to Windows, but it matters. For example you are about leave office, you shut down your laptop/desktop and then you manager ask to respond to an important email he just send. At this moment if you machine take too long to boot, you feel frustrated.

Another improvement is it takes lesser memory. It takes about 300 to 400 MB less as compared to Ubuntu 12.04. I've 8-10 tabs opened in firefox, 5-6 tabs in Opera, Netbeans with Oracle JRE, Konsole, mysql and apache. I'm running almost same version for all app except MySql and Apache. The performance improvement is because of improvement is base libraries. I would recommend OpenSuse 12.3 for expert and new users alike who are looking for a stable Linux distro with good performance and for fair balance of simplicity and good configuration options for those who want to tweak.

DrupalCon Portland videos.

html encode/decode in drupal

Like all major CMS drupal stores text fields in encoded html format, to prevent cross site scripting attacks. Some times drupal does not process custom fields and encoded text is displayed as it is. I come across similar issue in my current project. I also post question on StackOverflow. While search for solution I come to know about decode_entities function. decode_entities converts html encoded text to more friendly text. Similary to encode special charters in text you can use check_plain.

decode_entities function
http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes!unicode.inc/function/decode_entities/7

check_plain function
http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes!bootstrap.inc/function/check_plain/7

My question on StackOverflow
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14229641/rss-feeds-view-showing-encoded-special-character-in-title

OpenSuse 12.2 : Faster, better

After about 2 months delay from initial schedule, OpenSuse 12.2 finally arrived. During recent time, contribution to OpenSuse has increase a lot, so it is taking time review and accept/reject those changes, this is main cause of delay. OpenSuse is working on a mechanism to handle increased traffic. From the release announcement “The latest release of the world’s most powerful and flexible Linux Distribution brings you speed-ups across the board with a faster storage layer in Linux 3.4 and accelerated functions in glibc and Qt, giving a more fluid and responsive desktop. The infrastructure below openSUSE has evolved, bringing in mature new technologies like GRUB2 and Plymouth and the first steps in the direction of a revised and simplified UNIX file system hierarchy. Users will also notice the added polish to existing features bringing an improved user experience all over. The novel Btrfs file system comes with improved error handling and recovery tools, GNOME 3.4, developing rapidly, brings smooth scrolling to all applications and features a reworked System Settings and Contacts manager while XFCE has an enhanced application finder.” I downloaded KDE live image, now start testing.

Installation

Installation went smooth without any issue all hardware detected on my Compaq CQ-62 laptop. This time I did not any warning for bootloader installation, previously I got ‘root partition is above 128GB’ for bootloader, because of that issue I did not install bootloader from OpenSuse. Thanks to Grub2 this warning no longer appears, so I went ahead and installed it and system booted properly and Linux mint from other partition is also added to the list. The installer interface is same as last version.

First Impression & Booting

It boots really faster, less than half time as compared to 12.1. OpenSuse 12.1 takes about 72 secs and 12.2 takes 30 sec. I disabled few services and it goes down to 26 secs. After installing vmware and virtualbox it went up to 40 secs, which is still better than 12.1’s 72 secs. I need to find out the way to delay loading for vmware and virualbox modules loading. Anyway, I’m sure that people can reduce boot time to 12.2 in 20 sec for normal desktop. OpenSuse 12.2 uses SystemD is default boot/init system, which is much better. All major distros are switching to SystemD, except Ubuntu, which uses an inhouse alternate Upstart.

Overall system performance is very good. I use KDE desktop, it is very responsive. OpenSuse team has worked hard to optimise KDE. The latest version of KDE at the time of release is 4.9, but included version is 4.8.4. KDE 4.9 is available in OBS repo, the reason for not including is that 4.9 is release time is too close to feature freeze date. I did not updated KDE for the time being. I’m using Kubuntu on my office laptop, but the KDE of Kubuntu is not as fast as OpenSuse.


Conclusion

Overall I’m pretty happy with the improvements and performance of 12.2. It is must faster than 12.1 and also faster than Ubutnu 12.04. Majority of performance improvement comes from improvements in kernel and some base libraries.

I’ve been using it since couple of weeks, I faced only one issue which is related AMD/ATI proprietary drivers. Recently AMD is splitted it catalyst driver, better knows as fglrx, into 2 versions, first is legacy version for Radeon HD 4xxx series and older gpu and another is for 5xxx series and higher graphics cards. Unfortunately I’ve both the cards on my laptop, the IGP of my laptop is 4250 and discrete graphics card is 5400 series card. I tried installing both version of driver but none of them worked for me. Let me know in comments if you find a way to make it work.

Ideas - Better interface for yast services module

Here I'm posting an Idea to improve the interface to services module of Yast. Yast is the control panel like application in OpenSuse Linux. Yast is superb piece of software, I would say it is one of the best control panel among all OS available.

The current services configuration module is not very user friendly, even simple mode is very confusion for the first time users. Other distributions have much better interface. We can borrow few things from other distros. Ubuntu services manager (USM) - The interface is too simple, does not show service running status. System-config-service (SCS) - The interface is user friendly, separate tabs for background services and on demand service, large area for description and status. Windows - Shows service status in list, option for delay start of services.

I think we take few things each of theme. We can use USM interface for simple mode and SCS for advanced mode.

Yast is a superb control panel application but not cool, now we should make it the coolest app so OpenSuse become much more easy to use OS.
Basic mode should look this

Advance mode should look this

OpenSuse 12.1 - My new primary OS

OpenSuse 12.1 was released just few days back. I was expecting it to be the update of all the components. I downloaded the KDE live CD, burn it to DVD. I normally install linux using live USB drives, created using UnetBootin utility, which method does not work well for OpenSuse. Official method of installing from Live use drive is specified here http://en.opensuse.org/Live_USB_stick. This method has a problem that if format the USB drive in ext3 filesystem, so it cannot be used as regular storage device.

Installation run smoothly, installation from Live version asked lesser questions comparatively lesser then DVD installation, like, software selection etc.. For boot loader configuration it still shows "boot loader 128 GB" error, it is there since 11.3. So decided not to install boot loader at all, I have Kubuntu 11.10 installed on other partition of the HDD, so I used that boot loader. Automatic partition detection was really smart, it properly detected my home partition and mount point was set to /home, my existing OpenSuse partition was detected and set it "format and mount point to /", this is really nice thing. Rest of the installation went smoothly.

Since I have not installed the boot loader from OpenSuse, I have to boot into Kubuntu to update boot loader configuration, I used StartUp Manager. It is a very nice utility, I don't have to do anything except running and closing this application. It automatically detect and update the boot loader configuration. Then rebooted into OpenSuse, it automatically logged into the first user. I did not find any big change in booting time, it takes about a min to get to the my KDE desktop. All my hardware and peripherals were detected properly including WiFi. I tested Audio quality by playing a couple of mp3 files and experience audio quality much better than as with 11.4 but maximum sound volume is much lower than the previous release. After first boot I was greeted by default OpenSuse KDE desktop, Since I'm using existing home partition, I was expecting same old desktop that I have configured in Kubuntu. It looks like OpenSuse is using .kde4 folder for KDE settings instead of .kde as in Kubuntu and other distros. I think because OpenSuse still supports KDE3.

Drivers and apps
The first thing is ATI drivers, I followed this instructions from OpenSuse wiki. It works fine, I was having problem getting fglrx driver working in Kubuntu. In recent few releases fglrx driver have some issues, specially related to Gnome3. I installed 11.11 version of fglrx (or Catalyst Driver Suit), it still have some problems with Gnome3. KDE has BlueDevil app for bluetooth devices, it was not included in Live CD version. BlueDevil did not work well for me, I'm not able to transfer file via bluetooth. Next task is to install multimedia applications. I'm using VLC these days as default video player. Flash player 11.1 64-bit is also available in Non-OSS repo. Other applications that I installed are Opera, Thunderbird, QBittorrent, Skype, Google Chome, Google Earth and Wine.

After using for a week, I'm pretty happy with the performance and stability of OpenSuse. Over all experience is quite smooth, much better than Kubuntu 11.10. OpenSuse KDE still remains the most polished KDE among all other distros. OpenSuse 12.1 is going to be default OS on my laptop, until I find a better OS. I'll give it 4.5 out of 5.

Phonetic comparison of strings

I was working on data clean up to some schools database. Data can be in any language.
One of the thing that I have to as part of this, is to find possible duplicates. First we tried out soundex algorithm, which has build in sql server, it is a good algorithm but is most suitable names and surnames (as it was developed for use in census ). Next algorithm we tried is Levenshtien distance, this takes 2 strings and gives no of character different in both strings. For a table with 10k rows for checking one field for possible duplicates it was taking about 15 min, which is quite long. Levenshtien does not well for string with spaces.
Which make reduces its usefulness very much.
So I searched around for few better algorithms. I found a soundex derivative 'Daitch–Mokotoff Soundex' , but it is also for surname with Slavic and Germanic support. Another one I found is Metaphone, which is suitable for most English words, but it is somewhat suitable for english related language (like spanish), but for language like japanese,korean etc.. it doesn't work at all. For strings with spaces it is not much accurate.
There is an improved version of Metaphone named Double-Metaphone. On language wise it is same as Metaphone. For strings with spaces it is much better, it identifies both "bank of india" and "bankofindia" as
same, while non of other algorithm is able to find it. Here are the queries and there output 


select soundex('bank of india'),soundex('bankofindia')
-- B520, B521
select dbo.Levenshtein('bank of india','bankofindia')
--NULL
select dbo.Metaphone('bank of india'),dbo.Metaphone('bankofindia')
--bnk of int, bnkfnt
select dbo.DoubleMetaPhone('bank of india'),dbo.DoubleMetaPhone('bankofindia')
--PNKFNPNKFN,PNKFNPNKFN