Experiments with Technology

After having trouble with high CPU usage in the newest version of Ubuntu - 9.04, I finally managed to get it in control. The culprit is 'vino-server'. This starts running when one will enable Remote desktop on ubuntu. I did not intend to use it. I prefer nx-server for the remote desktop connection - far more efficient and secure. Somehow, vino got enabled. The problem is that it does not show up as Vino usage but as xorg process usage - and thats hard to diagnose. But finally, googling worked :). Go to system -> Preference -> Remote Desktop to disable this. I used - sensors-applets - CPU Frequency monitor applets (perhaps part of cpufreq-utils package) to switch the cpu to powersave mode and keep the cpu from overheating due to this unneccessary cpu usage. Having killed the vino server and disabling it altogether, I dont have to restrain my laptop cpu to a lower frequency anymore. Got tipped from here... http://www.eigenmagic.com/2009/05/23/fix-high-cpu-usage-in-ubuntu-90...

I recently purchased Belkin's N+ Wireless router. It worked great. Easy to set up and comes up LEDs that should help troubleshoot where the problem is. One of the other features is that it comes with a mount point for USB drive. This is good since it just provides an easy way to create a local NAS. You keep the drive in one place and access it from any of your laptops. Connecting it from Windows is easy. The usual \\belkin N+\Drive Name works. However, on linux, it did not work out of box. Looked like trouble with space in the name at first. But when I tried with IP address and it did work. I inferred space may not be the issue. I tried few suggestions from ... http://alittlecharm.blogspot.com/2009/06/connecting-ubuntu-to-belkin-n-usb-drive.html .. this did not work for me. Not as it is, at least. One reason i avoided to implement these suggestion as is that it required to install smb4k which would have also installed base kde and I wasn't in big favor of installing the whole t...