So I picked up my new laptop on friday. It’s an ASUS V6V – nice and fast, light, good resolution screen and lots of disk and RAM (it came with 1GB, I’ve got 2GB).

Anyway, the transfer of data from my PowerBook went fine. I waited for xfsdump to dump /home from the powerbook to a firewire drive (and for “waiting” I do mean going out and seeing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – which was very good).

Installing Ubuntu on the ASUS went like a dream. Everything, and i do mean everything worked out-of-the-box with only one tweak. That was uncommented the ACPI sleep configuration option do-dad in /etc/default/acpi-something-foo to get suspend to ram working.

The WEP didn’t work in the installer, so I initially just used the GigE adapter until the first reboot.

The firewire drivers don’t really behave with this laptop atm… that dreaded “aborted sbp2 command” error too often – so abandoned that and futzed around with a private net and NFS to xfsrestore /home.

Go to bed, awake later to find /home on new laptop (with an extra 23GB of free space!). I had to, of course – rebuild those essential packages for x86 instead of ppc – namely wesnoth.

oh, and cleaning out the ppc binaries from my mysql bk trees and doing a x86 build (I also had to change my CC from ‘ccache distcc powerpc-linux-gcc’ to ‘ccache distcc i386-linux-gcc’). One thing is for certain, it’s quicker at building things – even if the fan ramps up a bit when doing so :)

MySQL builds pretty quickly when you have a 2.8Ghz P4 and a 2.13Ghz Pentium M building it.

Anyway, set up all the apache foo for hacking on the LA website and MemberDB today. A load of the elections-result page on digital (the LA server – dual PIII 1.133Ghz) takes about fourteen or fifteen seconds using PostgreSQL as the database.

I previously reported that using MySQL (InnoDB tables) I got about twice the performance on my old laptop (1Ghz G4).

Well, on this one (2.13Ghz Pentium M) I’m getting the page loading in under three seconds. Sweet. Maybe I won’t go ahead and try to optimise some of the queries :)

(the query cache is probably coming into this – but i did do the query several times – so it’s not as if there’s any unfair advantage anywhere).

I’m using the 5.0.12-max-beta gcc dynamic build as downloaded from mysql.com for these runs. All other packages (apache2, php) are as shipped in Ubuntu. The my.ini file is as-shipped (err.. i think so: no query log, no binlog, slow query log enabled and some paths changed)