KTorrent rediscovered and it ROCKS!

I have just rediscovered KTorrent and I find it as a great alternative compared to more mainstream Bittorrent clients. Previously, I was using Azureus as it is feature packed and portable. I have been using it for a couple of years when Windows was still my primay OS and Linux was mainly for fun. It has I have tried KTorrent earlier but it was not stable has less features.

After installing Kubuntu, I tried to reinstall Azureus and it worked with gcj/gij implementation of JAVA but it was somewhat slow and unreliable. But I was a little lazy to download real Java runtime from Sun. So I decided to try the KTorrent that is part of default installtion. It is KTorrent 2.1 and 10 minutes later... I loved it. It has all the feature that I need from a Bittorrent client such as:

PeerGuardian IP blocking

Protocol Encryption

DHT, which is compatible with mainline version

Web UI

and it's UI is more responsive that Azureus

So, if you are using KDE, try it out!

New Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB EIDE harddisk and Kubuntu Edgy

I have just bought a new Caviar SE 250GB EIDE harddisk. I am quite satisfied with it. It run quite and cool just as advertised at it's website.


hddtemp shows 34°C when it is under light loading while my room temperature is 30°C:

$ hddtemp /dev/hda
/dev/hda: WDC WD2500JB-55REA0:  34°C

It is currently cooled with a standard 5cm case fan. Even without the fan it seldom reaches 40°C.

Anyway, these are some performance numbers which is pretty average and definitely nothing near high performance drives like those 10,000 rpm Raptors

$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads:  174 MB in  3.03 seconds =  57.48 MB/sec
$ sudo hdparm -T /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads:   1172 MB in  2.00 seconds = 585.58 MB/sec

BTW, I have now switch to Kubuntu (yeap, I prefer KDE compared to gnome). I have been using many different distros in the past from Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake, Red Hat 9.1, openSUSE 10.0, then SUSE 10.1. All of them are uses Red Hat/RPM based package management. This is the first time I actually used a Debian-based distro. I have to say that I am pretty happy with its apt-get style of package management. It is quick and easy. To install hddtemp, I just typed:

$ sudo apt-get install hddtemp

and in a few seconds.... done. SUSE 10.1's zenworks is one of the things in sometimes pissed me off because it crashes as I mentioned in an earlier post and it is SLOW! it takes ages to load YaST especially when a new repository was added. I have read that openSUSE 10.2 has kinda fixed that but I was a little lazy to download the 5 CDs or DVD image.

Kubuntu is simple, just one CD installation. Compared to SUSE, the default installation package is somewhat minimal. My girlfriend complained that it doesn't have any default games installed(she likes the Enigma game and even downloaded the Windows port for her laptop). However, the APT package management make installing additional software a breeze.

KEEP YOUR HARDDRIVES COOL!

Arg! There are dozens of bad blocks in my root partition and it does not boot properly anymore. It is a Maxtor 80GB HDD about 3 years old. This is the first time I had such a serious problem in my 12 years of experience with computers. I have help many people troubleshoot their computers with bad sectors in the past but this is the first time it happens to me! I have always kept my harddrives cool with a cooling fan.

Well, this Maxtor drive is not really mine, it was my girlfriend's. Last year, I bought a 160GB drive as I needed a new drive for Linux as my old 4.3GB is aging and getting slower but still no bad sectors! And, since I don't really need so much space while my girlfriend always complain that she does not have enough diskspace, so we swapped. She has a laptop and the 3.5" 80GB HDD is in an external USB/IDE enclosure that was not too well ventilated compared to my other older 40GB drive that is still running well.

Therefore, the lesson learnt is: KEEP YOUR HARDDRIVES COOL!

Anyway, this site has pretty good description on handling bad blocks for ReiserFS: http://www.namesys.com/bad-block-handling.html