Recently in Google Chromium Category

I've probably written a dozen entries in which I wondered aloud about how anybody could use the Google Chrome Web browser when, on my 512 MB Windows XP system, it literally ran aground after maybe a half-hour of use, with screens taking forever to render and sending me scurrying back to the relative comfort of Firefox.

Well since that time I've been running both Firefox and Google Chrome on a Windows box with 1 GB of RAM, and my opinion of Chrome has turned around: It's fast and stays fast.

I guess Chrome is one of those applications that just doesn't do well with 512 MB of RAM.

And now that I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my laptop that also has 1 GB of RAM — and I'm having "issues" with Firefox eating tons of CPU — I've installed a couple of other browsers, including the Webkit-powered GNOME browser-of-choice Epiphany and its close cousin (and Chrome twin) Chromium, both of which are easily added from the refreshingly simple Ubuntu Software Center.

(About the only thing I don't like about the Ubuntu Software Center is its method of installing an application as soon as you select it; I'd rather make a number of software selections and then have the system install them all together. I guess that's what the Synaptic Package Manager is for.)

So how is Chromium in Linux, specifically Ubuntu 10.04?

So far, it's excellent. Everything happens fast. There is absolutely no slowdown when I type into a Web form. I can see in top that when not in active use, Chromium (just like Epiphany) gives back almost all the CPU it uses when rendering a Web page (most unlike Firefox, which holds onto CPU even when you're not in a FF window).

Windows XP runs great in 512 MB. But if you're running a modern Web browser, you really need 1 GB for things to run smoothly. This doesn't mean a modern Web browser — especially Firefox — will run great on a Linux machine with only 512 MB of RAM. But I've never seen it choke so badly with 1 GB of RAM as I have in my current Ubuntu 10.04 installation.

The fact that Chromium is flawless on this configuration and with this CPU (1.2 GHz Celeron) says a whole lot.

My only problem is that the "core" of my Web-based work requires me to use Firefox. ... and if Chromium runs great in Ubuntu, it could only do better in a "lighter" environment, right?

In my ongoing quest to bring the latest news about Xorg and its hatred of the Intel 830m chipset that I have on three laptops, today I'm running a long filesystem check in gParted on the Parted Magic 4.9 live CD.

Don't get me wrong: I love Parted Magic. It's my preferred tool for partitioning drives with gParted and doing all sorts of other things. I generally don't burn new Parted Magic discs. I just keep using the same ones. The last time I made one, it was version 4.6.

But since my Toshiba 1100-S101 hates CD-R discs and likes DVD+R, I needed to burn the CD image onto a DVD. (Recently the Toshiba hasn't even been reading commercially created CD-ROM discs, so it looks like DVD-only from here on out.)

Parted Magic 4.9 is doing everything I need it to do. But I'm noticing in the helpful Conky output that Xorg is consuming 50 percent to 60 percent of the CPU at any given time. Hey, that's the same problem I had in Debian Squeeze ....

Whether this is something that can be addressed in xorg.conf, I don't know, but it is disturbing.

In other Parted Magic 4.9 news, I'm using the Chromium browser for the first time. It appears to work great. I'm no fan of Google Chrome on my Windows XP machine, but in Linux the Google-derived Web browser is performing exceptionally well.

I'm getting ready to install either Debian or Ubuntu again, and I'm undecided about whether or not to use encrypted LVM this time. I didn't have any performance issues with the encrypted drive, but my lack of knowledge regarding modifying LVM worries me. Specifically, Debian Squeeze appears to be larger than Lenny, and I'm worried that my root partition will be too small, and I won't know how to grow it and shrink /home — operations I'm very comfortable doing with non-LVM partitions in gParted.