Namebench is a utility made by some small start-up called Google Based on your location, Namebench finds the fastest domain name servers so that you can change your Internet connections settings to speed up your access overall.
Namebench has been around for awhile... more than a year. I learned about Namebench just recently when I was reviewing some "old" bookmarked articles that I'd made for later reading. I installed it on my Debian desktop and found that it worked very well... so I wondered about using it in Puppy. That's when I discovered Lobster's thread here and through some trial and error managed to test Namebench on Wary.
So here's the deal: You can download the latest source code from Google right here. The Linux based package is complete and does not need to be compiled. However, it does require Python to run. The readme file indicates:
In my testing, I could not get Namebench to run with Python 2.6.4 as I kept getting a seg fault. So I tried it with a later version, Python 2.7.2 which I found in this thread over here and voila... it worked. That said, there are a couple of things to note: if you need Python 2.6.4 to run Scribus for example, then keep it and install Python 2.7.2 as well. The current version of Scribus will not run properly with Python 2.7.2 --it generates some errors when loading. Also, I found that for multiple versions of Python to co-exist on my system, I had to install the earliest version first, the most recent version last. Lastly, I also installed Python-tk as it allows Namebench to run with a gui... however at this point Namebench is not able to find Python-tk, so it defaults to the command line. I suspect that I have to figure out what directories Namebench is searching for Python-tk and move the package there in order to get the gui experience --I haven't got that far yet.Requirements:
* Python 2.4 - 2.6. If you are using Mac OS X or Linux, this is
built-in. Otherwise, visit http://www.python.org/
To run Namebench at the terminal:
Code: Select all
/path/to/namebench-1.3.1
./namebench.py
Monsie