r3dux.org

Snarky bastards, aren’t they?

I’ve been watching a TV series of concerts held in a church called Beautiful Noise and it’s really rather good.

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I watched The Apples in Stereo Beautiful Noise episode earlier – and this track off their 2007 album New Magnetic Wonder made me smile.

I’ve just jumped ship from Ubuntu to Linux Mint Debian Edition (20011-08 RC1, 64-bit Gnome version) because as much as I tried, I just couldn’t get along with Xfce and Thunar, and I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with the Ubuntu desktop experience *@&%ers making decisions for me.

So now I need to be able to build the latest version of a few packages. Again. In this case, it’s GLEW 1.7.0 – but thankfully this one’s pretty do-able:

1.) Install some GLEW build pre-req’s with:

sudo apt-get install libxmu-headers libxmu-dev libxi-dev

2.) Get the GLEW source and extract it.

3.) If you want to install in /usr/local/ instead of /usr/ (which is generally a good idea for packages you’ve built yourself so you can easily distinguish them from “system packages”) then edit the Makefile in your extracted glew folder and make the following change:

GLEW_DEST ?= /usr

Should be modified to read:

GLEW_DEST ?= /usr/local

4.) On Debian it appears that /usr/local/lib64 doesn’t already exist as a symlink to /usr/local/lib (which means that you could end up with some of your stuff in the local/lib folder and some in the local/lib64 folder – which would be rubbish), so create the symlink yourself first with:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib /usr/local/lib64

5.) Run make then sudo make install

6.) Finally, once you have your GLEW stuff installed, don’t forget to link in libGL.so to your OpenGL projects, which if you’re making the switch from Ubuntu to Debian like I am, have now moved from /usr/lib/libGL.so to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGL.so, at least on my 64-bit setup.

Fun, eh? Sheesh!

Only joshing, Gabe – love ya really! But while we’re on the topic, could you Valve guys please get your arses in gear and make a frickn Linux client!

Well, you could use the top command, or maybe some ps grepping like this:

$ ps -ely | grep -E 'firefox|chromium|plugin'
S  1000  5214  5576  2  80   0 77916 232548 futex_ ?       00:01:00 chromium-browse
S  1000  5572  1984  1  80   0 85916 184994 poll_s ?       00:03:27 chromium-browse
S  1000  5574  5572  0  80   0 19276 60531 poll_s ?        00:00:02 chromium-browse
S  1000  5576     1  0  80   0 22476 67221 wait_f ?        00:00:00 chromium-browse
S  1000 31011  1984  3  80   0 415124 284530 poll_s ?      00:05:14 firefox-bin
R  1000 31211 31011 58  80   0 618876 349396 -    ?        01:31:23 plugin-containe
S  1000 32178  5572 13  80   0 62780 171077 poll_s ?       00:08:28 chromium-browse

But that’s not especially friendly to read, so how about simply going to the internal memory usage page at about:memory? (Note: Just put about:memory into the URL location and hit enter – I can’t link to it because it goes to about:blank instead!)

Presumably this is a cross-platform method, so available on any modern version of Firefox or Chrome. The details in the above screengrab were taken on Firefox 6 on Linux with two windows containing 8 tabs in total open, and it’s chewing on 316MB of RAM? Ouch. When my wife plays Facebook games I’ve seen Firefox eating over 700MB for a single window with a single tab running FarmTown or Treasure Madness or such, but I guess that’s more down to the bloat of those flash games than the browser… Still, good technique.

Credit where it’s due: Tip found on linuxers.org – good find!