Painless kernel mods with ELRepo

Here’s something to give a try if you’ve got a test box sitting around just begging for something to do.
First off, let me make clear that my only connection to the ELRepo yum repository is as a grateful user. ELRepo is, in the words of the main page:
a RPM repository for Enterprise Linux packages. ELRepo [...]

October 29th, 2009 by Phil Lembo 
Comments Off - Read More...

HP recognizes CentOS, and what’s this about Karanbir having a sense of humor?

You know you’ve gone “big time” when HP creates a support pack for your distribution:
Proliant Support Pack for CentOS 5 (picked up off Karanbir Singh’s blog, Thinkability).
Also, from the CentOS lists: Karanbir has a sense of humor!
[CentOS] [Found] CentOS is dead, long live CentOS
Steven Vishoot
Thu Sep 17 18:57:20 UTC 2009
* Previous [...]

September 18th, 2009 by Phil Lembo 
Comments Off - Read More...

use Seagate;

No. It’s not a perl module. It’s a hardware brand. One that I’m going to endorse right now with absolutely no incentive of any kind from the company.
Not so much for anything they’ve done, so much as what their competitors have failed to do.
Many, many years ago one of their famous competitors started a marketing [...]

September 10th, 2009 by Phil Lembo 
Comments Off - Read More...

External 4:3 monitor for a T61

External 4:3 monitor for a T61

I made a few changes to this when my original configuration gave me weird results. This kind of configuration is unfortunately an art, not a science.
This will be a quick, barebones, description of what I did to get this working.
Here’s the background:
Widescreen (6:9 aspect, 1440×900 rez) Thinkpad T61 laptop with the nvidia Quadro NVS 140M [...]

August 13th, 2009 by Phil Lembo 
Comments Off - Read More...

The T61 uses this nvidia driver

This evening when I got home from work I decided apply the latest kernel update to all my CentOS 5 machines, including the trusty Lenovo Thinkpad T61 I was issued by my employer. The impetus was another in a series of Enterprise Watch List e-mails detailing the vulnerabilities cured by the last couple of updates.
The [...]

August 12th, 2009 by Phil Lembo 
Comments Off - Read More...

Webcam picture too dark

So this is a problem I had with Skype. Most Linux apps that use a webcam actually provide a way to adjust brightness and contrast. Not Skype. Probably because this requires root privileges, and they know no self-respecting Linux admin is going to give them that.
The fix is actually pretty easy.
First, to see immediate results [...]

July 1st, 2009 by Phil Lembo 
Comments Off - Read More...

Linux memory utilization

Why is that Linux server using 96% of memory?
This question has come up a lot lately because we’re finally monitoring mundane stuff like memory utilization globally.
The answer? This is a “feature” of memory management in the Linux kernel.
A good article on this is Understanding Virtual Memory by Norm Murray and Neil Horman, published in the [...]

June 30th, 2009 by Phil Lembo 
Comments Off - Read More...
Older Posts »