Parted Magic: March 2010 Archives

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.