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Newer file systems try to keep files from becoming fragmented. Hard disk performance declines with fragmentation. When files are not placed in contiguous blocks, file fragmentation occurs. When a file is spread out over the hard disk, the hard drive "appears" to be slow to the user. The hard drive has to wait for the disk to spin to maneuver the read/write heads over the correct sectors. The lag time causes most users to believe the system is slowing down. The problem is not the computer, but the hard disk.

Many people know about compression by compressing a file to make it smaller for e-mailing. Others compress files to place on a small storage device such as a USB thumb drive or memory card. In these instances, a file utility is used to compress the data into a compressed format such as ZIP, RAR, TAR, and others.

Some file systems allow for native snapshots and cloning. The two have one difference, but otherwise are the same. The only difference between a snapshot and clone is that the snapshot is read-only, while the clone allows for reading and writing.

I created this how-to as none of the other instructions on the internet work correctly. This is done specifically for Ubuntu and Debian and is based on the 2.6.32 although with some common sense this should work with any distro and any kernel.

For most of us, the end of year brings performance appraisals and reflection on the year’s setbacks and accomplishments both professional and personal. In the glass bowl of life, I ask myself if I’ve made a difference, earned respect, have I grown from where I started the year? Technology has brought us innovation to hack our lives and measure our personal success through metrics. For example measuring sleep, weight, and activity. For example, I can see how much I slept, how fast I biked to work this morning, how often I biked, and the steps forward (or back) towards my goals. There is a dearth in tools available to measure personal work growth and effectiveness.

To some the GPL is merely a really cool model for developing software. It’s a way for many people, or many organizations, with a shared need or interest to develop software by spreading-out the cost through shared ownership of a product. Although that could also be accomplished with proprietary software, the open source license allows the use of different parts of the code in different applications, which might not be easily done under the proprietary model.

At its BUILD developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft developer and C++ Committee chair Herb Sutter talked about what Visual Studio users can look forward to over the coming years. Sutter also outlined Microsoft's ambition to comply with both the existing and still current C++11 standard, and the forthcoming update to that spec that should be completed in 2014.

PCLinuxOS LXDE 2013.06 is now available for 64-bit, as well as 32-bit systems. Features: Linux kernel 3.4.49 for maximum desktop performance; full LXDE desktop; NVIDIA and ATI fglrx driver support; multimedia playback support for many popular formats; wireless support for many network devices; printer support for many local and networked printer devices; addlocale allows you to convert PCLinuxOS into over 60 languages; LibreOfficeManager can install LibreOffice supporting over 100 languages; MyLiveCD allows you to take a snapshot of your installation and burn it to a live CD or DVD.

In the past few days I delivered X.Org vs. XMir Ubuntu Unity benchmarks on Intel hardware and Nouveau / NVIDIA. The benchmarking also found that 2D was also slower with XMir than simply running an X.Org Server. Benchmarks now carried out of X.Org vs. XWayland show that the Wayland-based equivalent is generally faster, at least for 2D operations.

KDE Commit-Digest: the latest updates and changes.

Mammoth Gravity Battles is a turn based strategy/artillery game with high quality graphics, featuring 2D and 3D levels, multiple weapons, four player battles and a story driven campaign. Similar to death star battles/gravity wars you aim the shots from your mammoth ships and watch as they fly in all three dimensions pulled by the gravity of the stars, planets, asteroids, moons and black holes in each sector. Currently being developed, for release in 2013 on Android, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Windows Phone 8, Windows PC, Windows 8 RT, Ouya, Mac and Linux.

Our latest Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" Linux benchmarks come in the form of comparing the performance of Ubuntu 13.04, an Ubuntu 13.10 development snapshot, and Fedora 19.

Manjaro Linux is a distribution that makes it very easy to play with Arch. Manjaro is to Arch as Sabayon or Calculate Linux is to Gentoo. Manjaro makes it very easy to deploy an Arch-based desktop using Xfce and other lightweight components, a theme that's continuing with their upcoming 0.8.7 release.

Citrix has announced this week that XenServer 6.2 is now fully open-source software. Citrix has made XenServer 6.2 available to all users as a free open-source virtualization platform, beyond just the Xen hypervisor that has been apart of the Linux kernel and one of the leading Linux virtualization systems aside from Linux KVM.

One of the shining lights of the world of Unix, retired CU professor Evi Nemeth, is among a group of sailors missing at sea near New Zealand. The author of system administration tomes covering both Unix and Linux – and, incidentally a mathematician of sufficient quality to identify problems with Diffie-Helman encryption – has spent much of her retirement sailing.

When you think about it, the idea behind “view source” is incredible. Not only can you, with the click of a button, instantly reveal a site’s code; you can copy, paste, tweak and make that code into something all your own. In many ways, it’s this concept that helped make the Internet such a revolutionary tool in the first place. And it’s this idea that lives at the heart of an open source web culture.

On Friday I delivered the first benchmarks of Ubuntu's Unity desktop running on XMir -- the X.Org Server compatibility layer for talking to the Mir Display Server. Those benchmarks showered there was noticeable performance overhead to running XMir with Intel's graphics driver. Later benchmarks showed XMir 2D performance was also negatively affected. In this article are benchmarks looking at the XMir performance with the Nouveau driver.

Yesterday I posted benchmarks of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver looking at the open-source driver performance for the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards. The performance is comparatively very poor right now compared to earlier generations of AMD Radeon hardware that is better supported. But how does the open-source performance compare between the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series and the NVIDIA GeForce 400/500/6000 "Fermi" and "Kepler" on Nouveau? Here's benchmarks.

The LXDE-based derivative of Ubuntu Linux has no plans to be using Mir, regardless of XMir or not.

The in-kernel DRM graphics driver changes lined up for the Linux 3.11 kernel are possibly the biggest set of Direct Rendering Manager changes ever, but it looks unlikely that the VIA KMS driver will be merged for this release.