I followed the excellent LVM Tutorial, and was surprised how easy everything goes. Here is a short cheat sheet of the important commands (take care to exchange the partition/volume names if you use this):

Installation

I use Ubuntu, so this is a piece of cake:

sudo apt-get install lvm2

There is also a GUI available, but I found the command line tools are very easy to use so there is no real need. I wouldn’t use EVMS as it is not supported in Ubuntu 7.10 and may cause problems.

Create a New Filesystem

First I create the physical volume on the partition sdg1, create a new volume group ext_vg that contains this physical volume, and create a new logical volume of size 450GB within the volume group. Finally create the filesystem (disabled reservation space, see Get More Space Out of Your ext3 Partition).

sudo pvcreate /dev/sdg1
sudo vgcreate ext_vg /dev/sdg1
sudo lvcreate -L 450G -n ext ext_vg
sudo mkfs.ext3 -m 0 /dev/ext_vg/ext

Show Status

Each LVM layer has its corresponding command to get information about the metadata:

sudo pvdisplay
sudo vgdisplay
sudo lvdisplay
sudo pvs
sudo vgs
sudo lvs

Mount via fstab

I use the filesystem mainly for data, so allowing just rw is enough (no executables allowed). noatime allows quicker access.

sudo mkdir /media/mega
/dev/ext_vg/ext /media/mega     ext3    rw,noatime,user 0       2
mount /media/mega

Resize

It is even possible to do an online resize of the system, wohoo This extends the logical volume by 200MB.

sudo lvextend -L +200 /dev/ext_vg/ext
sudo resize2fs -p /dev/ext_vg/ext

You can watch the resize process going on with df -h.

Add Another Partition to the Logical Volume

To add another partition and use up all the available space in the logical volume, first add the physical volume to the volume group, then use pvdisplay to find out the total available number of free PE (add the numbers from the physical volumes), then use lvextend to use up all this available space.

sudo pvcreate /dev/sdb1
sudo vgextend ext_vg /dev/sdb1
sudo pvdisplay
sudo lvextend -l +63602 /dev/ext_vg/ext
sudo resize2fs /dev/ext_vg/ext

That’s it! Any questions? please post.

I am a long-term StumbleUpon user, which means that I don’t get much sleep. Now, after almost 4 years of stumbling, I have decided to get my life back. Well, at least some sleep!

What does this do?

Every night when I have to work on the next day (Sunday night to Thursday night ), at 23:25 my computer shows me this little warning message:

I use this little trick with Ubuntu, but it should work anywhere where Gnome is installed.

How?

Thanks to the power of Linux, this is not difficult to do for yourself, and configure it however you want it to behave:

1. Open /etc/crontab with your favourite text editor (no need for crontab -e since this is the system wide crontab), e.g.

   sudo gedit /etc/crontab

2. Add the following lines (replace manker with your username!)

   25 23 * * 0-4   manker  /usr/bin/zenity --display :0 --warning --text="Shutdown in 5 minutes. Go to bed."
   25 23 * * 0-4   root    shutdown -h +5

3. The first part of both lines 25 23 * * 0-4 means that the commands are executed at 23:25, but only Sunday (day 0) to Thursday (day 4). Read man 5 crontab for a detailed description of that format.
4. The first command uses zenity to show a warning message. You have to execute this as the same user that you use for working, or you will not see the message, so change manker to your username (root does not work either).
5. The second command shutdown -h +5 means that the computer will halt in 5 minutes. This has to be run as root, and it also shows nice warning messages in all your open terminals so you can’t really miss it.
6. Save the file, and stumble until it is 23:25.

Sweet dreams!

tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdf1

Replace sdf1 with your partition name. You don’t even have to unmount your disk. Voilá, 11.5 GB more space for free Here is the output of df -h as proof:

Before:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdf1             230G  193G   26G  89% /media/disk

After:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdf1             230G  193G   38G  84% /media/disk

If you like this, you might also be interested in How to change Ubuntu forced fsck.

Update: The free space limitation is also used to prevent fragmentation. So if you set the limit to zero and operate on a very full harddisk for a while, your filesystem might slow down.

This encouraged me to do some further updates, I have incorporated lots of several tips and from the post “Making Eclipse look good on Linux“. The result is a very compact theme that does not waste space if possible.

• Get Clearlooks Compact here.
• Vote here if you think its good or bad.

Hope you like it as much as I do

UPDATE: Human Compact Theme for Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) is available!

Comparison

Move your mouse over the image to see how the dialog looks like with clearlooks-compact. The buttons and spacing are smaller, which results in much more visible space for the actual content.

More Screenshots

Here are some more screenshots that I have taken with Clearlooks Compact enabled. Especially the Eclipse shot is great, there the theme really shines. It is even more compact than the Windows XP look.

If you are curious, I have used Tahoma, size 9 for the application font, and the MiscFixed for the sourcecode.

Download & Installation

Installation is extremely simple, in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) you can do it this way:

1. Click System > Preferences > Appearance.
2. Drag & drop the link ClearlooksCompact-1.5.tar.bz2 into the Appearence window.

Beware that this is just definition of the Clearlooks control spacings. That means you have to have the clearlooks engine installed (which you most likely have, it is the default theme of Ubuntu). To change back, click on the currently active Theme, choose “Customize”, and select other controls instead of “Clearlooks Compact”.

History

I will regularly update this page when I update the theme with a new screenshot and the development history:

April 9th, 2009

Version 1.5: a bit smaller checkbox + selection box, less blurry and smaller progress bar.

April 5th, 2009

Version 1.4: added LGPL, index.theme, version number.

April 11th, 2008

Version 1.3: Small panel menu

November 11th, 2007

Version 1.2: Major update: Smaller handlers sizes, smaller scrollbars, no scrollbar spacing, less overall padding, and some more.

November 7th, 2007

Version 1.1: Now even more compact by reducing the default icon size to 16×16 pixels.

November 4th, 2007

Version 1.0: First release of Clearlooks Compact.

sudo tune2fs -c 0 -i 1m /dev/sda3

This disables maximum mount time for forced check, but instead uses timed check. Every month the harddisk is forced to get checked. I can live with that.

System

Due to popular demand, here is what my test system looks like: Ubuntu 7.04, Gnome, ATI Radion Mobile 9600 with fglrx driver, and a Pentium M with 1.5 GHz.

The Benchmark

I took the burden on me to do a comprehensive comparison of the text through of all possible terminals. The benchmark is very simple, I timed displaying the whole content of RFC3261. Download the file if you want to make your own benchmarks. The benchmark is executed like this:

time cat rfc3261.txt

I have measured the time in seconds. Without further ado, I give you the results (click here for a better readable PDF version, or click the image for a larger view):

larger view

Results

These are some very interesting results:

• Both gnome-terminal and konsole are exceptionally fast, it takes only 0.25 to 0.59 seconds to display the 647976 bytes large file. They buy the speed with quite a bit of memory consumption, and it can be clearly seen that the output does not smoothly scroll but only updates several times per second. This is a clever trick and has the advantage of being extremely fast, because not every letter needs to be pumped through the X windowing system. If you compile a lot or have other automatically generated output, gnome-terminal and konsole are the clear winners.
• konsole uses a lot of memory, about 32 MB. When setting the history buffer to 10.000 lines, it increases to 38MB per instance.
• gnome-terminal has a very different memory behavior. When you open multiple terminals, they are all memory managed from one gnome-terminal instance. This one instance requires about 45 MB freshly started. When opening multiple terminals and each one with 10.000 lines of used buffer, each terminal requires about 16 MB, so when you open more than three terminals at once you have already lower memory requirements than when using konsole.
• xterm is the slowest terminal. While it is probably the most widely used term, the only slower terminal is Microsoft Window’s cmd.exe! Each instance requires 16 MB RAM, which is a lot in comparison to other terms with similar features.
• wterm is both reasonably fast and the most memory efficient of all tested terminals. Each instance requires only about 6.3 MB of RAM, even with 10.000 lines of buffer. Only aterm but without buffer comes with 6.5 MB pretty close.
• Eterm is quite fast and memory efficient (9 MB), even with transparency.

Conclusion

So, what is the best terminal? The answer is actually quite simple:

• If you want speed, use gnome-terminal or konsole.
• If you are low on memory, use wterm, rxvt, or Eterm.
• xterm is slow.

UPDATE: Of course, the answer is actually not so simple. As some have told me, they get a quite different performance behavior on their system. I suspect that both the linux scheduler and the X scheduler has a lot to say in this issue too. So if you want to have results you can trust, you have to redo the benchmark on your machine. Fortunately, that’s simple: just cat a large file and measure the time it takes. Be sure to run it multiple times to get more accurate average numbers.

Other Remarks

• Windows does not have the time command, so I wrote a simple Ruby script that does the same thing:

  before = Time.now
  system(ARGV.join(" "))
  after = Time.now
  puts "#{after-before} seconds"

  Also, cmd.exe only allows 9.999 lines of buffer.

• If you want to display bitmap fonts in gnome-terminal, edit ~/.fonts.conf and add these lines right after the <fontconfig> opening tag:

   <!-- Accept bitmap fonts -->
   <selectfont>
    <acceptfont>
     <pattern>
       <patelt name="scalable"><bool>false</bool></patelt>
     </pattern>
    </acceptfont>
   </selectfont>

I hope this is helpful in your choice of the best console.

Search, install, remove available packages (preferred method)

sudo aptitude search ABC
sudo aptitude install ABC
sudo aptitude remove ABC

.deb (you have to take care of dependencies on your own)

sudo dpkg -i ABC.deb

.rpm (requires sudo aptitude install alien)

sudo alien -i *.rpm

.tar.gz (requires sudo aptitude install checkinstall)

tar xzvf ABC.tar.gz
cd ABC
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall

.package, .sh, .bin (Just download and execute)

chmod +x ABC
./ABC

.exe (requires sudo aptitude install wine)

wine ABC.exe