The System V init scripts are a bear to configure by hand. We discussed using chkconfig in this article. Ksysv, part of KDE, provides an easy to use GUI interface. Just drag the services to the appropriate place. The priority number, K/S prefix, and symlinks will all be set up automatically. Backup up all of […]

Minicom is a simple terminal program. We use it to access our servers via our serial port mux. Most likely your GNU/Linux distribution has Minicom as an available package. If not, or you would rather compile yourself, grab minicom from here. Unpack the sources in your favorite spot and compile: # cd mini* [minicom-2.00.0]# ./configure […]

Ever wish you could harness the power of many boxen to compile those large projects like KDE, or the LInux kernel? Well, you can, with distcc. We grabbed version 1.5, and compiled it on srv-33 and srv-34, two machines with P133 processors: # cd /usr/local/src # tar -xzf distcc*.gz # cd dist* distcc-0.15]# ./configure && […]

If you have some old Sun hardware you would like to run GNU/Linux on, the easiest way to get started is to use the CD-ROM images available at Aurora Linux. We’ve tried many different distributions, but the only one that we could get to load successfully is Aurora. Mebbe we are braindead, but if you […]

We have an old Sun box that won’t even run Solaris 8. Plus, Urbana wants to run Solaris 9 on the good Sun box, not GNU/Linux. After we optimized our system with Gentoo, we didn’t want to redo the compiles, especially on this slower box. We did a dump of the filesystem, installed Aurora on […]

We run Gentoo, and in our make.conf file we had CFLAGS=”-march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer”. Well, it turns out there is a bug. If you run this script: python -c ‘int(10.1); int(10000.3); int(1.2)’ You will get an overflow error. The fix is to use CFLAGS=”-march=pentium3 -mcpu=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer”. We just ran emerge glibc, and the […]

Linux From Scratch is a GNU/Linux distribution that you compile and piece together yourself. Gerard Beekmans and the LFS team have published LFS 4.1 as a book with a companion CD. We think that this is a fabulous way to document the heart of GNU/Linux. Own your own distribution. Don’t be buffeted about by corporate […]

For a serious analysis of what is going on with the whole SCO/IBM thing, check out the OSI Position Paper. But, for some Friday fun, check out The GNUkes of Hazzard.

Building from source is fun, but it’s easier to distribute RPMs to a bunch of machines. You may recall that we recently built and installed the OpenTDS libraries and SQSH, a dandy little command line tool for use with MS SQLServer. These built nicely on my RedHat 7.3 system, and I have a bunch of […]

Urbana used to work with a guy who routinely shut down GNU/Linux by typing: sync sync halt That just sounded plain crazy. Why not use shutdown? Well, we just figured he was just a little old-school. The command appeared to work (manpage for sync, manpage for halt). Now, our robocoop is running a giagd system, […]

We knew the answer to this question once, back when the world was young and full of truth. Without hesitation, we’d have spouted “Just take the output of lsof | wc -l!” And it’s true enough, in a general sort of way. But if you asked me the same question now, my answer would be: […]

Red Hat’s maintenance policy is nasty. On the one hand, they need to make money, and maintaining distributions is expensive. On the other hand, for those of us who use Red Hat in budget environments, we can’t really afford their advanced server product, and can’t afford to change to a new version every year. One […]

Check out Bruce Perens’ analysis here, and ESR’s An Open Letter to Darl McBride.

It has been awhile since we powered up the Sparc64 box we loaded Gentoo on in this article. Well, links was not on the box, and we wanted it. Emerge failed: srv-44 scsi # emerge links . . . !!! Couldn’t download links-2.1_pre2-patch.tar.bz2. Aborting. Doh! We have to emerge portage and sync it: srv-44 scsi […]

We ran across an interesting problem when using our trusty loadlin boot diskette to boot one of our machines when we had a grub freakout: Uncompressing Linux… ran out of input data — System halted_ It turns out that this happens when the kernel is over 1 meg. There are a couple of options. There […]

I was reading Wired last night, and there was an interesting article about Torvalds. You can read the article here. There was a blurb in it about the Stallman GNU/Linux debate that bothered me. Stallman is a crank in the finest sense. This means that when he says something, it is usually true, you just […]

We have a Sony Cyber-shot model DSC-U20 camera. We had to add USB filesystem support and generic SCSI support to our kernel, but besides that, using the camera with GNU/Linux was quite easy. After your kernel is happy, just plug in your USB device and run dmesg: root@srv-1 u-1 # dmesg . . . hub.c: […]

One problem that can get really nasty is if you update an RPM system with the wrong version of glibc. First, we need to find out what glibc RPMs are installed, and then we can determine the architecture: [root@srv-3 root]# rpm -qa | grep glibc glibc-devel-2.3.2-101 glibc-common-2.3.2-101 glibc-kernheaders-2.4-8.36 glibc-2.3.2-101 glibc-headers-2.3.2-101 [root@srv-3 root]# rpm -q –qf […]

It is daylight savings time again. For those systems that don’t automatically sync their time, you may have to set this manually. If you are in the U.S, you can find the correct time here. Let’s set the system time: root@srv-1 u-1 # date Mon Apr 5 03:45:59 PDT 2004 root@srv-1 u-1 # date 040504142004 […]