Monthly Archives: January 2013

A-drupaling I shall go…

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I finally quashed (more or less) a couple of issues that had been nagging me with the website that I created and maintain for Orange District, Occoneechee Council, BSA. I did some maintenance this weekend, upgrading Drupal core as well as some modules that needed updates. The web-based module updater broke when I switched to PHP 5.4, as my ISP is deprecating PHP 4 and 5.2, and I needed to do manual module updates. Hopefully the web module updater will get fixed in Drupal 7, but some of the things I read made me think it won’t be until Drupal 8. Also, I’d been having a problem with the calendar view throwing lots of warning errors and I’d not been able to find out what was causing it. Seems to have varied causes with module/database dependencies but predominantly in Views and CTools. This also started when I went to PHP 5.4. I was able to figure out what to back out to get the warnings to stop (a Google calendar overlay), but I’d like to get that functionality back. I opened up an issue on the FullCalendar module to see if anyone has ideas.

Also, I spent some time this weekend working up a website for a friend who’s a local farmer. We found a nice Drupal template and have a skeleton set up…

Not so fast on the ChromeOS swap file…at least on the ARM ChromeBook

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I first thought I’d stumbled upon a way to turn on the virtual memory on my ChromeBook, but as I’ve looked at it and read about it, this does not yet work on the ARM version of ChromeOS on my ChromeBook. However, it’s been a useful exercise, as I’ve read up on a number of things. This trick does work on non-ARM ChromeOS, and may be useful on a CR-48! I’ll have to wait on mine. A useful thing in tracking memory utilization and page discards (the main symptom of low memory) is found on the chrome://discards URL. It will show you basic memory stats plus the count of discards since the last reboot. My initial euphoria about memory was caused by rebooting after making the attempt at the swap setting. I’d not realized how much difference rebooting made in reducing the page discard rate.

So, those with Samsung ARM ChromeBooks will have to wait, but if you start seeing a lot of page discards (and confirmed with the discard URL), just reboot (only a few seconds on Chrome!) and it will be much better…

More fun with Chromebooks, enabling the swap file…

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I’ve been enjoying my Chromebook, but one issue that’s been a bit frustrating has been the way it discards (& reloads) tabs when you have several tabs open. This isn’t an issue on the 4GB ChromeOS devices like the ChromeBox or the Samsung 5 550. However, on a 2GB ChromeOS device, it’s been a bit of a pain. More than 4 or 5 tabs would mean a reload, particularly with memory-intensive AJAX pages like Gmail. It looks like I’ve found a way around it. I’ve been spending a bit of time on the ChromeBook Central Google Group, and ran across this thread on enabling zRam (swap file). So far, I’m quite impressed with the results. Right now, I’ve got 10 tabs open, and still have ~240MB free per top in crosh. I’m not sure what the downside is, and why this is not enabled in the build for 2GB devices. I’m running on the beta channel with R23. Time will tell if there’s any problem, but I sure wonder why Google doesn’t put this in as a default on 2GB ChromeOS devices.