December 6, 2004

  • What the hell is wrong with Fedora™?

    It really bothers me to
    see stupid things happen on Linux. We're using a Fedora Core 2 box to
    do an information system security course project. We've heard rumors
    about how sucky Linux based on Red Hat® are, compared to the other
    distributions, but the two things below are just weird (or stupid).

    nice and renice: not so nice

    If you are a power user of Microsoft® Windows®,
    you probably have fiddled around with the Task Manager, where you can
    manually set the priority of different processes. The same kind of
    utilities exists in Linux,  and they are the following 3 commands:
    nice, renice, and top.

    Linux has a much more fine-grained
    priority scale, with 40 priority levels (highest priority to lowest
    priority: -20 to 19) instead of the 6 levels in Windows (Realtime,
    High, Above Normal, Normal, Below Normal, and Idle). Linux's 40 levels
    of priority are, however, pretty useless. I was running Crack5 (a
    password guessing program) through SSH on the Linux machine. Obviously,
    it is calculation-intensive and constantly takes up over 99% of the CPU
    time. At first, it was running at the normal priority level (level 0).
    When I tried to log in at the machine, it took half an hour for the
    desktop to show itself. Mind you, this is a Pentium® 4 2.4 GHz we are
    talking about here. So I got pissed and SSH'ed in from another terminal
    to renice Crack5 to 19. It still took me 30 minutes to log in and another 30 minutes to log out
    of the GNOME™ desktop. This kind of thing would never happen on
    Windows XP.

    Where is my Chinese input?

    Fedora comes with
    multilanguage support, right? It's got all kinds of keyboard layouts, and the default settings
    include Korean and Japanese. But where the hell is my Chinese layout?
    I mean, it's a language used by 1/4 to 1/3 of the world population.
    What the hell would you smoke in order to omit a keyboard layout for
    Chinese?

    - SwordAngel

    Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvald.
    Fedora™ is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc.
    Microsoft® and Windows® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
    Pentium® 4 is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation.
    GNOME™ is a trademark of GNOME Foundation.
    God I hate trademark notices...