Author: Gayan

Because it is directly associated with the overall responsiveness, any operating system prefers to keep the users’ most frequently used data (programs, files etc) in RAM because data on RAM can be accessed extremely fast when compared to other storage mediums (disk drives, flash drives …). That said however, since RAM is not cheap, its capacity is limited on most occasions and thus, when dealing with memory hungry programs (and while trying to find ‘room’ for opening new applications), the OS is going to have to move some of the currently unused data into another storage medium (temporarily), which is…

The world’s most popular open-source operating system ‘Ubuntu’ has reached the 13.10 (code named ‘Saucy Salamander’) release, although the most anticipated feature – ‘Mir’ (the new display server designed by Ubuntu developers) did not make it into the 13.10 Desktop and Server releases due to few technical issues. This of course is not unexpected, I mean, the display server is a major component of any operating system, and designing one from scratch and taking it to the point of a stable release, well, that is a lot work. So hopefully ‘Mir’ & ‘XMir’, coupled with Unity 8.0, will be ready…

‘Manjaro’ is a GNU/Linux distribution that is developed in Austria, France and Germany. It is based on Arch Linux’s core, although Arch Linux is famous for being a fast, lightweight and for having bleeding edge software, a package manager of its own (‘pacman’) plus, has one of the best documentations available on-line – covering various topics of GNU/Linux, it is a bit difficult to set-up and thus is not that popular among those who are new to GNU/Linux. ‘Manjaro’ on the other hand tries to prevail where Arch Linux has ‘failed’ and thus, it comes with an extremely easy to…

Elementary OS is a GNU/Linux distribution (based on Ubuntu core) that has a desktop environment and a few major applications of its own. From a developer’s perspective, this gives them a lot of control over their OS, and thus, makes it easy to fine-tune and optimize it, in ways that they desire. That said, when you are developing some of the ‘major’ aspects of an OS from the ground-up, and does not posses a lot of man-power, then pushing a new release is going to be a tedious task. And thus as a result, ‘Luna’ has taken 2 years and…

Fedora 19 ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ got released few days ago, and since I have not reviewed Fedora on this blog (mainly because I did not have a lot of positive things to say about it), I decided to review it. But as usual, I will be sticking with the performance related aspects of the operating system, rather than describing what is new with the desktop and applications. However, if I feel fit, I will mention some of those features as well. Also remember that, since Fedora has always had strong ties with the Gnome desktop, I am using the GnomeShell version…

When a user runs a program, the operating system first loads its data into ‘RAM’ (Random Access Memory – a very fast data storage medium used in computers that can hold data temporarily). And when that program gets terminated, the operating system, rather than completely getting rid of its data on RAM, moves the program and its data into another location on RAM called the ‘page cache’. If the user reruns the program (say after a short while), then the OS first looks for its data in the ‘page cache’, and if the data is there (fully or partially), then the…

The recently released, Ubuntu 13.04, not only brings up-to-date packages (including LibreOffice 4.0), which is pretty usual, but according to its ‘Release Notes’ page, ‘Unity’ desktop 7.0 too brings noticeable improvements, concerning memory consumption & performance. On a side note, I know this might sound a bit weird, but from all the Ubuntu versions that I’ve tried over the years, the best performing ones (less bugs & solid performance) were the ‘ .04’ numbered versions, the ones that get released in April. Where the ‘.10’ versions are usually buggy. Anyhow, I decided to write a simple review, by comparing both…

‘WaveShop’ is a free & open-source audio editor for the Windows operating system. It’s also a ‘bit-perfect’ audio editor & thus, the audio that is loaded into ‘WaveShop’ will be the same that’s rendered to the sound output device, without adding any filters, unless chosen otherwise. You can ‘Copy/Cut/Paste/Delete’, ‘Undo/Redo’, ‘Select/Deselect’, ‘Zoom in/out’ etc with ‘WaveShop’. It also comes with a lot of audio filters/effects such as: ‘Amplify, Extract, Fade, Normalize, Re-sample, Channel insert, Swap Channels, Spectrum generation, Reverse audio’ & more. It supports loading and saving into a lot of different formats, but saving into ‘MP3’ is not yet…

‘B1 Archiver’ is a completely free file archive manager that can be used in GNU/Linux for opening ‘7z’, ‘Rar’ & ‘Zip’ file formats. By default, GNU/Linux support ‘Zip’ but doesn’t support ‘Rar’ due to its ‘pure’ proprietary nature & ‘7z’ support is also dropped due to file permission incompatibly, though it’s an open-source format. One can easily add support for these formats under most distributions, including Ubuntu by installing other file archive managers such as ‘PeaZip’ or using command-line tools. Now ‘PeaZip’ is perhaps one of the best ones out there, but I find it to be a bit too…

For years, ‘KMPlayer’ has been my favorite media player under MS Windows. It can play almost any audio/video codec, has a beautiful UI, comes with a huge number of options, completely free, one couldn’t ask for more :D. I’ve also used ‘Media Player Classic’ (comes with ‘KLite-Codec pack’), though I have a tremendous respect for it, I just can’t stand its ugly user interface. Anyhow, from recently, I’ve been having some playback & video rendering issues with ‘KMPlayer’ under Windows 8. This wasn’t surprising either, because according to my experience, ‘KMPlayer’ is not the most durable/robust one out there. So,…

My previous encounter with ‘openSUSE’ (12.2 KDE) did not go that well, although I loved the KDE desktop, its customizability, ease of use and all that, it did not however ‘score’ that well in terms of being a stable and ‘responsive’ operating system under somewhat ‘heavy’ disk stress. For instance, if I were to open few programs while the HDD was very busy (say while copying a large file within the same disk), then for a few seconds the whole operating system seemed like stuck, and then everything would come back to ‘live’, but it would get stuck after another…

‘Audio to video synchronization’ is an extremely important aspect of a multimedia file, because when playing, multimedia players rely on it for properly synchronizing the audio and the video tracks. If the synchronization value is incorrect, then the audio (or the video) is going to be played early or with a delay, compared to the other, which is commonly known as ‘lip-sync’ errors, and it jeopardizes all the excitement, obviously. For instance, while watching a movie, if you have ever come across situations like gunshot firing sounds coming out before its video scene is displayed, then that is due to an…