I’ve used Glen Turner’s procedure for recompiling FC2 kernel quite a number of times, but I always find it difficult to locate using Google. I’m linking to it here so that I’ll find it again, but I hope its useful to others as well.
Ran into this document explaining how to install Microsoft’s TrueType core fonts on Linux. Ran through the instructions and it worked a treat on my Fedora Core 2 machine. Hopefully having the right fonts will help Firefox render some pages that it otherwise struggles with. From the page in question…
Features
- Does not distribute Microsoft’s fonts in a prohibited way (to the best of my knowledge that is)
- Doesn’t bypass the rpm database like other font install scripts
In my current quest the get as many of my HP Pavilion laptop’s features working under Linux as possible, I’ve now enabled DPMS. DPMS allows X to turn the monitor off (thus saving power) when not required. I got it working thanks to this handy article.
I found this tip on Everything SysAdmin for finding infected machines. By using tcpdump and a bit of Unix shell we can find the machines in the network sending the most ARP requests.
What’s one sign that a machine is infected with some kind of malware? How about a quick test to see which machines are ARPing the most?
ARP requests aren’t necessarily a sign of infection, but a machine that is ARPing a lot is connecting to a lot of different machines. Unless the machine in question is a server of some kind that’s probably something that should be investigated. Hence a list of machines which are ARPing a lot becomes a useful tool.
Nathan Willis has written an excellent article for Newsforge explaining font support in Linux. An excellent introduction to a topic I knew very little about,
As recently as two years ago, the average deployed Linux system had inconsistent font support — some applications were not able to access all the installed fonts on the system, some applications were incapable of anti-aliasing, and a user trying to sort it out quickly became mired in an alphabet soup of confusingly-similar terms: TrueType, OpenType, FreeType, Type 1, et cetera.
Linux Insider has an excellent wrapup of many diferent Open Source Weblog, and Content Management Systems.
But you may ask, why focus on the cheap? Isn’t a professionally developed site better? Maybe, but most open source content management systems are developed by professionals; they’ve just chosen to release their creation to the public, rather than a life of contracts, licenses and upgrade timelines. Grateful users can donate financially, but it is not required. Open source developers are artists, without a doubt.
I’m slowly getting all of the hardware in my HP Pavilion zt3000 laptop working under Linux. Audio, Wired network and the Burner were no problem, they were detected automatically by Fedora Core 2’s install program. Video also works well, but I’m yet to get the 1280×800 resolution I need from X windows to take full advantage of the 15in Wide Screen. I haven’t tried using the modem yet, but I suspect I could be out of luck there (not to worry, I don’t use dial up anyway). The built in “Intel Corp. PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter” wireless didn’t work out of the box, but this article gave me the info I needed to get things going in under 10 minutes.
Next things to try… Getting maximum resolution from the display, and configuring power management!
Luckily, earlier this year Intel started supporting a native drivers project for the Centrino WiFi chipsets. I dug in and got them working on my laptop fairly smoothly.
You need the driver source (I used version 0.54) and firmware image files for hotplugging (neat way wrestle hardware into Linux friendliness when needed).
Linux Magazine has an article which shows you how to tweak your Linux install so that it will run well on a laptop. Covers things like APMd, CPU frequency scaling and other useful techniques.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve run across two new Linux distributions, which I thought I should link to and say a bit about. First up is Ubuntu Linux.
“Ubuntu” is an African word, meaning “Humanity To Others”. The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.
Ubuntu is a pretty bleeding edge distribution based on Debian. It features the latest Gnome (2.8) including Evolution 2.0. Ubuntu’s release cycle is tied to Gnome and promises releases much more often than standard Deb. The default install looks nice and slick (and a little apple inspired perhaps?). At a Linux advocacy event I was involved with last week we demonstrated Ubuntu alongside SuSE, Fedora and RedHat, and Ubuntu was the one everyone seemed to like.
I’d love to try Ubuntu on my laptop and see what happens. Although I’m really only just getting my Fedora customised the way I want it. Edd Dumbill’s Weblog also gives Ubuntu a good writeup.
Once concern that I’ve had with Fedora is it’s extremely short support lifecycle. For some desktops, and testing machines this isn’t a major drama, but for servers and some applications this is a major problem. Red Hat’s commercial offerings fit the bill well in that department, but not everyone can afford them.
There’s a couple of solutions though. White Box Enterprise Linux aims to…
To provide an unencumbered RPM based Linux distribution that retains enough compatibility with Red Hat Linux to allow easy upgrades and to retain compatibility with their Errata srpms.
White Box shows some real promise, but looks to be in reasonably early stages. Along a similar line, CentOS is a similar idea…
cAos also hosts two Enterprise Linux solutions, CentOS-2 and CentOS-3, based on Redhat Enterprise Linux 2.1 AS and 3 ES respectively, and in full compliance with RedHat’s redistribution requirements.
Both White Box and CentOS exist to bridge the gap between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise products. While I haven’t used either, CentOS has received strong recommendations from people I trust. I’ll try and check both out in the months to come.
Havoc Pennington has unveiled some of the work Red Hat is doing on a thing they’re calling “stateless linux”. The StatelessLinux PDF explains what it is and what they’re hoping to achieve.
Essentially though, stateless Linux is a more flexible version of terminal servers, and diskless workstations. Centralised control, management, and storage of user data, while still allowing disconnected users to function (e.g. laptops). In some cases the root file system would be NFS mounted, in others though its talking about caching a file system image on the local machine (allowing disconnected operation).
“There aren’t many new RPMs for this, because stateless Linux isn’t a single codebase or package, it’s a set of changes across the distribution (you might think of it as a “philosophy”). Most of the changes are already in Rawhide
I think Red Hat is on a winner here. Centralised storage and backup, and to some extent disconnected operation are important issues for many organisations. It will be an interesting project to watch thats for sure.
Found via Linux Today.
