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I’ve been following Ian Lance Taylor’s updates on the status of gold, the new binutils linker, for a while, so when he announced that he’d added it to the binutils tree, I decided to make a little time to try it out.
I have a fairly large C++ application handy, so I tried linking it on [...]

Upgrading my laptop from F-7 to F-8 yesterday was painless, so I’ve been able to verify that the latest version of GHC works smoothly. I’ve pushed the built packages to the F-8 testing repository, and will bump them to release in about a week.
If you’re feeling impatient, you can download the final RPMs from the [...]

I’ve been running test releases of Fedora 7, and lately the final release, for a number of months on my fairly new Lenovo Thinkpad X60. Here’s a brief summary of my experiences. I’ve been using Fedora since 0.92 (Taroon), and while I’ve generally been happy with it, F7 is not exactly a model of stability or sleekness. Here’s a [...]

With Jens Petersen’s blessing, I’ve packaged GHC 6.6.1 for Fedora Extras. If you use FC6, it’s available via yum as of a few days ago. It will be a part of Fedora 7 as soon as that comes out, too. The upgrade to 6.6.1 necessitated a bump of the release number of the Fedora Gtk2Hs package, too. [...]

I recently bought a Thinkpad X60 that came with Windows preinstalled. I never actually use Windows, but it’s convenient to have around for the occasional BIOS update. My Linux distribution of choice has long been Fedora. Unfortunately, unlike other modern Linux distros, Fedora doesn’t provide a simple graphical means to shrink an NTFS partition in its installer. Since the X60 doesn’t [...]

Since I’ve been away from the Haskell world for a long time, it’s been interesting to return and observe some surprises about the practical side of working with the language. For me, an early gotcha has been the relative paucity of information on how to obtain and install third-party software packages. So here’s my little contribution, [...]

One of the exciting things about upgrading to Fedora Core 6 is that the yum package manager now frequently hangs on me. This does not fill me with joy. The most common way in which it falls over is by hanging hard after printing this message: Parsing package install arguments What it means to “hang hard” here is [...]

Since FC6 ships with Python 2.4, you’re a bit stuck if you want to play with the new features of Python 2.5. Here’s a quick and easy way to build and install a cleanly-packaged version of Python 2.5 for FC6. First, you must ensure that you have a sufficient development environment available. Fortunately, you can do [...]

In an earlier post, I briefly discussed the oprofile system profiler. I was going somewhere with that; here’s another step along the path. Modern CPUs that use virtual memory have to be able to turn virtual addresses into physical addresses efficiently. While a userspace process operates on virtual addresses, accessing any part of the memory hierarchy [...]

If you’ve had to do much performance tuning on a Linux system, you may have come across the oprofile system profiler. It may sound like a great piece of software, but it’s got a name for being difficult to use. In this article, I’m going to try to show that oprofile is decidedly non-scary, and is [...]