24 May 09 Changing Server Timezone in Ubuntu
I thought I would jot this down. To change the timzone of your Ubuntu server execute the following command:
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
This Ubuntu community wiki page has some good info on time in Ubuntu.
07 May 09 Firefox, Ubuntu, NVIDIA, and Slow Javascript
I noticed that some web pages that make use of Javascript were acting very slow in Firefox on my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS powered Dell XPS M1530 laptop that has an NVIDIA graphics card. Apparently a lot of other people have too. I finally got annoyed enough to research my options, and a work-around posted in the referenced bug tracker did the trick for me. First I had to do a “apt-get install nvidia-settings” to install a program that lets you tweak the NVIDIA driver settings. Then you need to tweak one setting as follows:
$ nvidia-settings -q InitialPixmapPlacement $ nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2
The first command shows you the current value of the setting InitialPixmapPlacement. On my system, this was a 1. I wrote this down in case I need to switch it back on a future release. On the second line, you jam that setting to a 2. And voila, everything suddenly ran a lot smoother.
Postscript: Although this did seem to help with some issues, it still isn’t completely resolved. Aargh.
Update 12 November 2009: Changing the Gnome desktop theme to Clearlooks from Human made a noticeable difference. It isn’t perfect yet but it really helped.
Tags: firefox, javascript, nvidia, ubuntu
