I want to control which services run at boot time in Debian
I want to control which services run at boot time in Debian
Hi there.
Ok after my Gentoo failure I decided to follow some advice that was given to me ages ago and get Debian.
I installed the net-install method, it was a little odd, and something must have broken somewhere as I made choices along the way about my keyboard, time zone and monitor resolutions, none of which was correct when the install completed, I have now sorted this and I am kind of happy, I choose a 'nice' theme, installed any extra apps I wanted, and so far things seem pretty good.
There are a couple of things I want help with:
1: When I press the power button on my PC the machine turns off instantly, this did not happen with Fedora; the machine used to stop services etc before. (I think this is just a parameter I need to pass at boot time)
2: I run folding (folding@home - the protien thing I suspect you have heard about it)
My machine is performing considerably slower than it did under Fedora, I know that different work units take longer etc, but this is terribly slow. I want to know how I check/choose what services are running.
I have gnome installed, and under Fedora I think it went something like this:
Applications>System Tools>Servers>Services
Where do I find this under Debian?
Also I have noticed that the screen savers run real slow as well, now I have to be honest here - I don't really care about the screen savers but I am wondering if this is also a side effect of a service running that I don't want - for example the service that slows your CPU down, as I know this has a nice effect on the performance of folding on my Fedora Laptop.
I would also like to know where it is that I setup Samba under Debian, as the Linux machines see each other fine, and the windows machine can see the Debian machine but it does not have access - so I am unable to see any files etc.
Thanks for any help with this.
Dave
Ok after my Gentoo failure I decided to follow some advice that was given to me ages ago and get Debian.
I installed the net-install method, it was a little odd, and something must have broken somewhere as I made choices along the way about my keyboard, time zone and monitor resolutions, none of which was correct when the install completed, I have now sorted this and I am kind of happy, I choose a 'nice' theme, installed any extra apps I wanted, and so far things seem pretty good.
There are a couple of things I want help with:
1: When I press the power button on my PC the machine turns off instantly, this did not happen with Fedora; the machine used to stop services etc before. (I think this is just a parameter I need to pass at boot time)
2: I run folding (folding@home - the protien thing I suspect you have heard about it)
My machine is performing considerably slower than it did under Fedora, I know that different work units take longer etc, but this is terribly slow. I want to know how I check/choose what services are running.
I have gnome installed, and under Fedora I think it went something like this:
Applications>System Tools>Servers>Services
Where do I find this under Debian?
Also I have noticed that the screen savers run real slow as well, now I have to be honest here - I don't really care about the screen savers but I am wondering if this is also a side effect of a service running that I don't want - for example the service that slows your CPU down, as I know this has a nice effect on the performance of folding on my Fedora Laptop.
I would also like to know where it is that I setup Samba under Debian, as the Linux machines see each other fine, and the windows machine can see the Debian machine but it does not have access - so I am unable to see any files etc.
Thanks for any help with this.
Dave
Ok, have checked top, it is showing that folding is taking a good 95% which is good, I want it to take as much of CPU as possible.
I have included the output of top, but I am not sure what the little box thing is all about as that does not show up in my text editor, so not sure why it has stuck loads of little boxes in there:
[/code]
So that would look like folding is getting a good share of the CPU, which I guess would suggest that the problem is not with any greedy service running, unless of course you think other wise.
Unfortunately I do not have my laptop at the minute so I can't check the name of the service in Fedora that seems to slow the CPU down.
Another concern of mine is that the folding is not at a constant slow speed, I left it for the duration of yesterday, by the time I turned the machine off it had gone from doing 1% in 40 minutes (slower than I would expect it to, based on performance under Fedora) to 1% in about 103 minutes - I wonder if I had left the machine on, would it have ground to a halt?
I wasn't using any more applications at the end of the day than I was at the beginning, I had firefox open with 3 tabs, thunderbird, and obviously folding.
When I turned the machine on:
Just before I turned the machine off:
Any ideas?
thanks
Dave
I have included the output of top, but I am not sure what the little box thing is all about as that does not show up in my text editor, so not sure why it has stuck loads of little boxes in there:
Code: Select all
[H[2J[?7l[mtop - 15:49:29 up 5:55, 3 users, load average: 1.08, 1.08, 1.02[m[39;49m[K
Tasks:[m[39;49m[1m 95 [m[39;49mtotal,[m[39;49m[1m 2 [m[39;49mrunning,[m[39;49m[1m 93 [m[39;49msleeping,[m[39;49m[1m 0 [m[39;49mstopped,[m[39;49m[1m 0 [m[39;49mzombie[m[39;49m[K
Cpu(s):[m[39;49m[1m 15.3% [m[39;49muser,[m[39;49m[1m 0.2% [m[39;49msystem,[m[39;49m[1m 81.1% [m[39;49mnice,[m[39;49m[1m 3.5% [m[39;49midle[m[39;49m[K
Mem: [m[39;49m[1m 257044k [m[39;49mtotal,[m[39;49m[1m 245604k [m[39;49mused,[m[39;49m[1m 11440k [m[39;49mfree,[m[39;49m[1m 20100k [m[39;49mbuffers[m[39;49m[K
Swap:[m[39;49m[1m 771080k [m[39;49mtotal,[m[39;49m[1m 260k [m[39;49mused,[m[39;49m[1m 770820k [m[39;49mfree,[m[39;49m[1m 80564k [m[39;49mcached[m[39;49m[K
[6;1H
[7m PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND [m[39;49m[K
[m[1m 1740 me 20 19 20116 19m 1060 R 95.9 7.8 288:11.52 FahCore_78.exe [m[39;49m[K
[m[1m 2012 me 11 0 976 976 760 R 3.8 0.4 0:00.05 top [m[39;49m[K
[m 1 root 8 0 508 508 452 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.04 init [m[39;49m[K
[m 2 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.17 keventd [m[39;49m[K
[m 3 root 19 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd_CPU0 [m[39;49m[K
[m 4 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.06 kswapd [m[39;49m[K
[m 5 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bdflush [m[39;49m[K
[m 6 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kupdated [m[39;49m[K
[m 99 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.08 kjournald [m[39;49m[K
[m 347 root 7 -4 444 440 392 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 udevd [m[39;49m[K
[m 427 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd [m[39;49m[K
[m 1221 root 9 0 860 860 740 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 dhclient [m[39;49m[K
[m 1226 daemon 9 0 448 448 380 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 portmap [m[39;49m[K
[m 1391 root 9 0 804 804 700 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.01 syslogd [m[39;49m[K
[m 1394 root 9 0 1364 1360 484 S 0.0 0.5 0:00.07 klogd [m[39;49m[K
[m 1401 messageb 9 0 1004 1004 892 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 dbus-daemon-1 [m[39;49m[K
[m 1407 root 9 0 872 868 732 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.05 dirmngr [m[39;49m[K
So that would look like folding is getting a good share of the CPU, which I guess would suggest that the problem is not with any greedy service running, unless of course you think other wise.
Unfortunately I do not have my laptop at the minute so I can't check the name of the service in Fedora that seems to slow the CPU down.
Another concern of mine is that the folding is not at a constant slow speed, I left it for the duration of yesterday, by the time I turned the machine off it had gone from doing 1% in 40 minutes (slower than I would expect it to, based on performance under Fedora) to 1% in about 103 minutes - I wonder if I had left the machine on, would it have ground to a halt?
I wasn't using any more applications at the end of the day than I was at the beginning, I had firefox open with 3 tabs, thunderbird, and obviously folding.
When I turned the machine on:
Code: Select all
[09:58:08] Completed 34891 out of 1000000 steps (3%)
[10:40:28] Writing local files
[10:40:28] Completed 40000 out of 1000000 steps (4%)
Code: Select all
[18:13:57] Completed 90000 out of 1000000 steps (9%)
[19:32:46] Writing local files
[19:32:46] Completed 100000 out of 1000000 steps (10%)
[21:15:46] Writing local files
[21:15:46] Completed 110000 out of 1000000 steps (11%)
thanks
Dave
I think those little boxes are double-byte font characters. It simply means that the font being used doesn't have characters that correspond to those codes, so it prints the codes. Usually, you see that with Japanese or Chinese or Korean characters. But perhaps there are some strange characters in your terminal font that aren't available to the webserver. I'm in Firefox right now, and I see the boxes. But usually, my Mac can read the characters just fine. Weird thing.
dickinsd wrote:
You need to apt-get install sysv-rc-conf and then launch the program from within a console window.
From there you can start or shut down every service in each runlevel.
Shut down everything you don't need and look at the performance of your system after that.
If something still is wrong we'll try to take it from there.
I'm curious about what kernel version you are running.
I also have ksoftirqd_CPU0 running but it consumes 0.0 % of my cpu cycles.
I googled a bit and came up with a lot of people complaining about latency and stuff like that and noticed that they were all running 2.4 versions of the kernel.
Did you apt-get install kernel 2.6.11 already?
And regarding the boxes in your console window I had something similar with RH8 back in the days and it had something to do with konsole not being UTF-ready if I remember it right.
Voidmain came up with a fix pretty quickly, I'll see if I can dig up something about that and update this post if necessary.
There is no such thing under debian.I have gnome installed, and under Fedora I think it went something like this:
Applications>System Tools>Servers>Services
You need to apt-get install sysv-rc-conf and then launch the program from within a console window.
From there you can start or shut down every service in each runlevel.
Shut down everything you don't need and look at the performance of your system after that.
If something still is wrong we'll try to take it from there.
I'm curious about what kernel version you are running.
I also have ksoftirqd_CPU0 running but it consumes 0.0 % of my cpu cycles.
I googled a bit and came up with a lot of people complaining about latency and stuff like that and noticed that they were all running 2.4 versions of the kernel.
Did you apt-get install kernel 2.6.11 already?
And regarding the boxes in your console window I had something similar with RH8 back in the days and it had something to do with konsole not being UTF-ready if I remember it right.
Voidmain came up with a fix pretty quickly, I'll see if I can dig up something about that and update this post if necessary.
Yes, that was it!
dickinsd, what is your LANG variable set to?
You can check it in the /etc/environment file.
Edit: I just realized that you said it didn't show up in your text editor so I assume the boxes don't show up in your terminal, am I right?
If so ignore this last post and I will slap myself 3 times for not reading thoroughly from the first time!
dickinsd, what is your LANG variable set to?
You can check it in the /etc/environment file.
Edit: I just realized that you said it didn't show up in your text editor so I assume the boxes don't show up in your terminal, am I right?
If so ignore this last post and I will slap myself 3 times for not reading thoroughly from the first time!

No I kind of made an assumption that I would have a fairly recent kernel with my newly released Debian distro, however this was clearly wrong as I have a kernel of 2.4.x-386Ice9 wrote: I'm curious about what kernel version you are running.
I also have ksoftirqd_CPU0 running but it consumes 0.0 % of my cpu cycles.
I googled a bit and came up with a lot of people complaining about latency and stuff like that and noticed that they were all running 2.4 versions of the kernel.
Did you apt-get install kernel 2.6.11 already?
I have since upgraded to the 2.6.8-k7, which I believe would be the best for my CPU, although I am just off to find the 2.6.11 kernel as I could not see anything like that when I looked earlier. (the upgrade from kernel 2.4.x to 2.6.8-k7 made no noticable speed improvement)
I am using Synaptic, I take it that it is fine to use synaptic to get my kernel, it should have a selection of new kernels available yes?
I am also going to get the package: sysv-rc-conf in a moment as well, as I have noticed at boot time that there are services such as Appletalk, which I definately don't need, so there could be a good drain on the system from services I don't need.
Thanks for your help so far.
Dave
dickinsd wrote:
If you do an
apt-cache search kernel-image you'll get a complete list of all the kernels available, select the one that's most suitable for your config and you're set.
Just looked and this is probably the one you need
kernel-image-2.6.11-1-k7
You should be able to "apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.11-1-k7"
I personally use synaptic the least possible, especially when upgrading kernel, xfree and stuff like that.I am using Synaptic, I take it that it is fine to use synaptic to get my kernel, it should have a selection of new kernels available yes?
If you do an
apt-cache search kernel-image you'll get a complete list of all the kernels available, select the one that's most suitable for your config and you're set.
Just looked and this is probably the one you need
kernel-image-2.6.11-1-k7
You should be able to "apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.11-1-k7"
Of course you can always download and build your own kernel. Get the source from http://www.kernel.org/
Because apt won't give him bleeding edge kernels, like 2.6.11-12. Or, because he wants to include support for some really bizarre type of optical drive. Or because he wants to reduce his kernel size down to where it will fit on a floppy.
Or, because he's a sucker for punishment
Actually, I take that back. Learning how to build your own kernel is a good learning experience. Especially since you are pretty much guaranteed to screw something up your first time.
Or, because he's a sucker for punishment

Actually, I take that back. Learning how to build your own kernel is a good learning experience. Especially since you are pretty much guaranteed to screw something up your first time.
Thanks for the help, as for the kernel, for now I would like to stick to the apt (easy) way of doing things
Can I ask what repositories you are using as I do not have this kernel version available to me.
Are the repositories for apt the same as those for synaptic? If so I only have blueyonder.co.uk Stable listed.
Thanks
Dave

Can I ask what repositories you are using as I do not have this kernel version available to me.
Are the repositories for apt the same as those for synaptic? If so I only have blueyonder.co.uk Stable listed.
Thanks
Dave