Older blog entries for gpoo (starting at number 4)

II Fórum GNOME in Brazil

Finally I'm going to Brazil to the second version of Fórum do GNOME that will take place at Curitiba, Brazil. I'm looking forward to meet Lucas Rocha, Sandino Flores, Tim Ney, Marcos Mazoni, Izabel Valverde and local community. (Thanks to Celepar for funding my ticket to get there).

I will also be speaking about GNOME at "I Seminário de Software Livre", at Univeridade Metodista de São Paulo on Tuesday 29.

Sadly, I won't be able to attend to "III SOLISC - Congresso Catarinense de Software Livre" at Florianópolis, because I must to be at my work on Friday 2.

I'll do my best effort to get my slides in brazilian portuguese; (but also in spanish and english as backup). Just I'm little worried, not because of the language itself, I know they understand spanish and I understand some portuguese as well; it's because I usually speak a fast spanish, even for chilean standards. I hope nobody care to stop me any time is needed.

A graph of gnome-session

Thanks to a Tatiana's coursework, we took a short time to make a graph of the init session of GNOME using Bootchart.

Bootchart is a program to collect information of the use of disc and processor of the system. It was created to be able to collect real data with which to be able to determine the necks of bottle in the init process of Linux and thus to be able to accelerate it.

It seemed to be "an invasive" process, that it requires to perhaps modify the kernel or something similar. The certain thing, is that to collect the data it is only required to install an script, which must be invoked by kernel. Don't forget that the first process executed executed in UNIX is init; instead of invoking to init it is necessary to invoke to bootchartd, which leaves running some processes in background and later it will invoke to init. It is as simple as adding the following option in the boot:

init=/sbin/bootchartd

The collected data will be stored in /var/log/bootchart.tgz (which contains 4 archives); file that will be the input for bootchart, a program written in Java that allows to generate a graph from the collected data.

Basically the program reads every 2 seconds the virtual archives/proc/diskstats,/proc/stats and/proc/*/stat (for each one of the processes in execution). Being thus, it is possible to use it to measure other programs; for example, the init session of GNOME.

Perhaps many already they have realized that the starting depends much on the time that takes gconf in reading all the preferences and schemes. Thus, Federico has been indicating it for already a month and Havoc has let know that it is a pending issue of gconf and is awaiting for some developer takes the task to solves the problem.

As an image is worth more than thousand words, I ran bootchartd to make a graph of my GNOME session in a notebook (Centrino 1.8 Ghz, 512 MB ram):

Graph of the GNOME's init session
Graph of the second session. The firts one takes more time, but it's possible to get the idea.

It shows the time that each application in initiating takes, as well as the disc use that each program does. The process really start when the gdmgreeter is replaced by x-session-manager, and it happens whe the user and password are entered and it's finish when the interface is ready to be used; in my case it happened in second 23.

The reading of gconf varies according to the amount of stored keys, which goes in direct relation with the use of applications that a user has. Thus, in the first session of a user, gconf carries out less than 1/3 of the readings that the graph of my session of today. As well as it varies if it corresponds to the first session since the computer start up.

As is possible to see in the graph, there is another process that for much reading to disc, it is Jamboree, which reads the music archives. Also, there is a python process that make a intensive use of CPU in a little period of time (which is related to the notificador of updates of Ubuntu).

The process of data collection is simple:

$ sudo bootchartd start
$ (one begins the session, via gdm, startx, etc.)
$ sudo bootchartd stop
Once the process finish is time to run bootchart to generate the graph. If Java is not available on the machine, still is possible to get the graph filling a form in the website of Bootchart.

At first sight, it seemed that the process of data collection is complex. But it is not. The main process is processing the collected data and get the graph.

Cultivating Third World Countries Developers

I just uploaded the slides of my talk/BOF in the 6th GUADEC at Sttugart.

My original idea was to write about the discussion that we had. It was quite interesting for me. But I haven't have engough time to do it.

Anyway, some of the slides were written as funny and superficial. It was a mix of joke and serious talk; mainly to get an idea of some differences that people perceive in 3th world countries, some of them could seem stupid/strange for a structured mind.

The original idea was born in the middle of a conversation that Roozbeh and I had in the 5th GUADEC at Kristiansand, Norway.

New place for GNOME's writings

As far as I have my own space to store my writings I decided to use this space to write my GNOME's related topics.

Also, my main blog it's written in spanish and I'll follow write there in my native language, because I know it's read by people that only speaks in spanish.

I started writing as a personal record of my activities, after that, to keep my friends updated without repeating every activity every time.

Because there are friends and people that doesn't speaks spanish I decided to start writing in english as well. At first time, just only GNOME's related topics, where belongs the most people I know.

25 Sep 2002 (updated 22 Sep 2005 at 03:45 UTC) »

Please follow my diary at written in spanish. Also I write sometimes an english blog.

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