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 […]

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: […]

There are two main bootloaders you can use with Linux these days: LILO and GRUB. Red Hat uses GRUB by default now. Most distributions used LILO until quite recently. We built a fairly souped up Linux workstation w/ a large Maxtor IDE drive. We decided to use Sorcerer GNU/Linux; however, we had a horrid time […]

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 && […]

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 […]

Logical Volume Manager (LVM) allows you to combine disks and create a single volume that can be mounted like a regular partition. It also allows you to add and remove storage. Make sure that you have the support for LVM compiled into your kernel. We set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_LVM=y on ours, and that worked well. [Note: Before […]

In this article, we set up Logical Volume Manager for GNU/Linux. We created a 12 GB device from 3 4 Gig drives, but only assigned 5 GB for our logical volume. Now, we are going to extend that volume. [Note: Before you do anything involving your partitions or volumes, make a complete backup. Make sure […]

In this article, and in this article, we showed how to install and extend logical volumes with LVM. Now, we want to shrink the filesystem we created and the logical volume, so we can remove the drive. [Note: Before you do anything involving your partitions or volumes, make a complete backup. Make sure to set […]

In this article, we freed up a disk from our volume so that we could reconfigure our system. In this article we will create and add a RAID1 device to our volume group. We removed /dev/sdg from our volume group, and /dev/sdh was unused, so let’s create a RAID1 device to add to our volume […]

So far, we have been using a generic 2.4.24 Linux kernel with LVM enabled. We had to compile this ourselves because the stock Red Hat / Fedora kernels don’t support our hard disks. See this article for more details. [Note: Before you do anything involving your partitions or volumes, make a complete backup. Make sure […]

In this article, we recompiled our software and kernel so we could remove our /dev/sde drive. [Note: Before you do anything involving your partitions or volumes, make a complete backup. Make sure to set up a test system with the same kernel and distribution to see how this stuff works. This article was written using […]

Agatha recently purchased another stick of 512MB RAM. It turns out that by default you need to change the kernel for it to use more than 1GB of RAM. Actually, the cutoff is technically at 960MB. Here is the memory info with 1.5GB of RAM installed, but with high memory support disabled: usr-1@srv-1 proc $ […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]

There are 7 parts to this article: Part 1 – Gentoo on SPARC – Booting the Install CD Part 2 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Filesystems Part 3 – Gentoo on SPARC – Copying Initial System, Portage, and Distfiles Part 4 – Gentoo on SPARC – Creating the Kernel Part 5 – Gentoo […]