Recently, I received a free 128MB chunk (That’s what they call a VPS) with 3GB storage and 35GB bandwidth per month for free. They says that its free for lifetime, if put into some use. My plan is to use it for delivering this site, which runs on wordpress, along with few other stuffs.

128MB RAM is very limited and there is no extra burst memory available. But, being a XEN VPS, I hope to get a satisfactory performance. The first thing I did was to measure the performance using UnixBench benchmark suite and the report is as follows.

My laptop, HP NC6220 is confirmed dead. Its issue with display repeats after 3 days of servicing and the service engineers couldn’t rectify it permanently. So, they agreed to give a refund and I am forced to buy a Laptop. Thanks to the financial support by parents, I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E430 (3254 AM4) yesterday. Special thanks to my cousin Prakash for arranging it at the lowest rate possible.

I also bought a Lenovo G580 7036 for my friend Deepak and spent most of the time, yesterday configuring it. Will post a review of that asap.

So, I have used the thinkpad for just few hours and here goes my experience with it.

The basic configuration of the system is:

Intel Core I3 2330M – 2.20GHz
2GB DDR3 RAM
500GB HDD (7000 RPM)
14″ HD Antiglare Screen
DVD Writer
720p Webcam
Card Reader
Finger Print Reader
4 USB ports (2 with USB 3 support)

We @ DayScholars finally managed to arrange a good PC to setup as a centralized server for our code and databases. The server is running a customized Debian Squeeze distribution with MySQL Version 5.1. So the next requirement is to allow MySQL access for all of us. This is how we managed it. You must login as root user or must have root privilege to do this.

Edit the MySQL configuration file, located at /etc/mysql/my.cnf.

We prefer using vim. You can use any others like nano or even gedit.

Today, almost all in my class(May be all @ college) came to college thinking of strike. But surprisingly, nothing was there in front of the college gate(For all strikes, we usually see a lot of students gathered there blocking the way to college). So, everyone went to classes sadly… 🙁

There were rumors that the class will be suspended by noon. After the 2nd period, few seniors came with the notice and all was happy. I have nothing to do at home, so, I stayed at college and with the permission of HOD, continued with the Debian installation in the Internet and Multimedia lab of CSE department. Though Mahesh was present, he was busy with some other works. My classmate Mansoor KPA also helped me in the installations. By 4.30PM, we installed 15 systems with Debian and the one alloted for GNULab with gNewSense.

At Fastech Systems, Valanchery, I installed one of the systems with gNewSense 2.0 delta-h. It is a distro derived from Debian and Ubuntu, but follows the philosophy of GNU in the packages. It comes in a CD with both live and install features. Its similar to Debian and Ubuntu in the visual aspects, but has got more packages than the Debian installation CD. Since installation is from the Live CD, its much easier. Also, I felt it more faster than Debian which was in the same system earlier.

Another important feature is that gNewSense has got a repository located in India, which I felt faster than the Debian’s, located in US.