Guides | Linuxaria

Review and repair a Linux SWAP Partition

Nov 182013

Original article first published in Spanish on http://vidagnu.blogspot.it/

Yesterday I ran into a problem in a SWAP partition on an Astaro Command Center, so I decided to restart with an Ubuntu CD, and my first attempt to repair the system was with the fsck command, but when trying to use it I got the message fsck.swap: command not found

So I check with the badblocks command that the partition had no bad blocks.

sudo badblocks -v /dev/sda2

The above command did not return any error, then searching the Internet I found this simple way to rebuild a damaged swap partition.

How to put in pause any process in Linux

Guides 1 Response »

Nov 102013

Linux is much better at multitasking processor-intensive tasks than Windows. I remember how virus scanning used to make by old Windows PC almost unusable. Linux is much better, but sometimes bad things happens ! Perhaps a plugin of your browser is using all the CPU, or some bad software is freezing your system, or Apache it’s eating up all your resources on your server.

If you have seen some situation like these, don’t worry anymore, you don’t need to kill all the offending processes, restart your graphical session, or even worse restart the computer, you can simply put the specific process in “PAUSE” and analyse the situation, in some cases you could find the cause of a poor performing process, or just restart it in a second moment, maybe after you have saved all your works, when you can give to that process all the CPU.
Continue reading »

How Configure an Android Development Environment on Linux

Articles, Guides 5 Responses »

Nov 062013

Original article (in spanish) posted on http://vidagnu.blogspot.it/

In this post I want to show the steps you must follow to have a Development Environment for Android in your Linux distro.

What do you need?

Java Development Kit JDK – version 6 is suggested
Android SDK Software Development Kit
Eclipse for Java Developers – version 3.7.2 is suggested
Android Development Tools (ADT)

Let’s go !

Linux Terminal: Check who uses all your memory with smem

Guides, Pills 6 Responses »

Oct 202013

As system administrator, or simple user that uses Linux on its desktop sometime you notice that something it’s eating all the memory of your system.
As first thing be sure to understand how Linux manage memory, I’ve be called too many time by scared users that did a free and were unable to read its output properly, in short, don’t worry if the Linux Kernel it’s using your memory to cache file.

< rant on >

To my “beloved” users:

Be assured that the Kernel developers can do a better job than you (and me) in find a good algorithm to cache file and free that memory area when a process need it, so please don’t ask me to put in cron some job that run something like that :

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

After that you’ll have more free memory available on the system, true, but the system will have to re-read all the files from the disk, so in terms of performance this is usually a bad move.

< /rant >

But now let’s take a look at a nice small program that can help us in find which process/users are using, for real, the memory of our systems.