Creating a presentation for showing source code

Giving a presentation which has source code fragments has never been easy.

Normally, I have been pasting code fragments in an OpenOffice presentation. The effort in getting it right has been sufficiently irritating that I try to avoid it.

I finally used a process which I found very convenient.

1. Use vim :TOhtml command to get color coded source code. It was even easier using gvim.

2. Open the html file in OpenOffice. Change the font size to 16.

3. Create a new OpenOffice text document. Choose page size as A5 and landscape orientation.

4. Copy paste the fragments. Add comments, etc. Edit like a normal text document.

5. Export it to pdf.

6. Show it using the presentation mode in evince or  okular.

Overcoming Slow Boot of Fedora 16 after LiveCD installation

I had failed to upgrade Lenovo S10-3 netbook to Fedora 16 using yum as I have been doing for several years and successfully did on my desktop. The system became unusable under Fedora; so, I could not diagnose the cause.

I installed KDE livecd spin on the netbook. The boot time seemed to be ages in comparison to Fedora 15 and, especially, Arch Linux which I normally use on this netbook.

Searching the net for plausible reasons led to using "systemd-analyze blame". The top of the list was "udev-settle.service", which really is not the issue.

Anyway, I noticed that there were livesys.service and livesys-late.service which are not needed once the livecd is installed. The time shown for these by "systemd-analyze blame" was 290ms and 44msec respectively. Hardly something to worry about. However, disabling the livesys and livesys-late services resulted in the userspace boot time decreasing from 87 sec to 36 sec! The overall decrease was 97 sec to 44  sec :)

Now, "systemd-analyze blame" gave a little more useful details. The top entry was iscsi.service. Wikipedia entry indicated that this was not something I was likely to use. Disabling iscsi and iscsid services reduced the userspace boot time to 27 sec and overall time to 37 sec.

Removing mdmonitor-takeover and lvm2-monitor services did not make any significant difference.

Disabling httpd and and mysqld, which I normally do not need on the netbook, saved another 5 sec and the boot time now is 32 sec of which 22 is the userspace time.

Next step is to use bootchart to see if I can understand where the time goes before the system becomes usable.