Google Drive on Linux

 Posted on April 22, 2019  |  Nitin Gupta

There is no official Google drive client for Linux. I tried many different clients found all over GitHub but none of them worked reliably for me except rclone. I also tried third-party proprietary clients like Insync but allowing read-write access to all your Google drive files to a closed source blob is too much to swallow. Once caveat with rclone is that it does not natively support bi-directional sync (github issue) but someone developed a python script rclonesync-V2 which is a wrapper around rclone which does the job. [Read More]
linux  google-drive 

Faster compilation with distcc

 Posted on June 19, 2010  |  Nitin Gupta

Often, you have more than one system at your disposal but no clear way of distributing your compilation workloads over to all or some of them. They might be running different OSes which makes it look even more difficult. In my case, I have one laptop (2 cores) and a desktop (4 cores) connected with a WiFi network. The laptop runs Linux (Fedora 13 64-bit) while the desktop runs Windows 7 (64-bit). [Read More]
linux  virtualization 

Compressed RAM disk for Windows, The Virtual Way!

 Posted on May 30, 2010  |  Nitin Gupta

Recently, I developed Linux kernel driver which creates generic RAM based compressed block devices (called zram). Being RAM disks, they do not provide persistent storage but there are many use cases where persistence is not required: /tmp, various caches under /var, swap disks etc. These cases can benefit greatly from high speed RAM disks along with savings which compression brings! However, all this seems to be completely Linux centric. But with virtualization, zram can be used for Windows too! [Read More]
windows  linux  compression  memory  research  virtualization 

Setting up KDE API Documentation

 Posted on April 10, 2010  |  Nitin Gupta

Since last few months, I have been playing around with KDevelop which is a KDE based IDE for C/C++ any many other languages. Its a large C++ codebase and navigating through all the files, classes is quite difficult with usual VI + cscope combination. The most lacking part is a readily accessible KDE API documentation which is almost essential, no matter what component you are working on. There is a KDE API reference site but searching there for every reference is very cumbersome. [Read More]
programming  linux 

Comprehensive graphical Git diff viewer

 Posted on December 27, 2009  |  Nitin Gupta

Since a long time, I was looking for a graphical git diff viewer which could show original and modified file side-by-side and highlight the changes. There are few solutions but none of them is sufficient: A tool included with git called ‘git-difftool’ is partially helpful – it can show changes graphically but diff for each file is shown one-by-one. This is very irritating. In fact, unusable even with just 10-15 files. [Read More]
linux  git 

Linux kernel workflow with Git

 Posted on September 23, 2009  |  Nitin Gupta

You worked on some part of Linux kernel. It works great. Now, how to generate the patch series and send it out for review? For this, I always used to generate diffs, create a set of draft mails (one for each patch) in KMail or Thunderbird, and send all these mails one-by-one. This workflow quickly became a big headache. Then I learned Git (and some related tools) to do all this from command line and wow! [Read More]
linux  git 

Fedora 11 on ThinkPad W500

 Posted on June 19, 2009  |  Nitin Gupta

This was the release I was waiting for! The installation was a bit of a trouble but it was surely worth the effort. Its really the first Fedora release that I really liked. Its stable, has good hardware support and boots really quickly (<20 seconds on my system). In my case, Windows 7 RC was already installed on one partition, so Fedora 11 (x64) was installed in second partition. So, now I have dual boot configuration – the windows boot loader presents option to continue booting windows or launch GRUB from Linux partition. [Read More]
linux 

ccache to speed-up Linux kernel compile

 Posted on March 19, 2009  |  Nitin Gupta

In case you are unfamiliar with ccache, its a “compiler cache”. Compiling is primarily CPU intensive task. So, ccache caches compiled objects - so next time we compile same code, it reuses these objects thereby significantly speeding-up compilation. I need to recompile Linux kernel usually several times a day, with different permutations of config settings. This almost forces a ‘make clean’ or ‘make mrproper’ which deletes all compiled objects in build tree and then we have to rebuild everything all over again. [Read More]
linux 

SLOB memory allocator

 Posted on March 18, 2009  |  Nitin Gupta

Linux kernel has few SLAB allocator variants included: SLAB, SLUB and SLOB. Of these, SLOB is especially meant to be used on embedded devices – it tries to be more memory space efficient than other SLAB variants. Yesterday, I had a detailed look at SLOB allocator for possible use in compcache poject and found it unacceptable for the purpose. I did it in response to feedback on xvmalloc allocator – as part of compcache patches posted of inclusion in mainline Linux kernel: [Read More]
linux 

Fedora 10 instability issue solved!

 Posted on March 18, 2009  |  Nitin Gupta

One of my Fedora 10 systems used to freeze very frequently. After lot of looking around I found its because of “KWin Composing” which gives OpenGL driven special effects for desktop. Unfortunately, Linux has always been bad at radeon drivers, so it better to disable these effects especially if you have radeon video cards.

in ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc:

in [Compositing] section change
Enabled=true to Enabled=false.

Reboot after this change. Now I never get any system freeze - as is expected from solid Linux system :)

linux