Hi,
I'm a 40-year old sysadmin living in Montpezat, a small village in the sunny south of France. I'm a Linux user since 2001, when I made my first steps on a 486 with a Slackware 7.1 CD. I've tried maybe two dozen distributions, but I've stayed mostly with Slackware and Debian.
Since last summer, I work as a sysadmin for our "Communauté de Communes", a group of 16 villages, where I care for computers and installs of town halls and public libraries. I've configured a LAMP server in a datacenter, running Debian Sarge, and all clients in town halls and libraries are running Debian Etch, a highly stripped-down and personalized GNOME desktop with just a handful of apps needed for work.
I've fiddled with CentOS before, around when 4.3 came out, and it was a close second in the choice of OS here. Had 5.0 been out at the time, I would gladly have chosen it. I've discussed the subject with Daniel de Kok, a fellow ex-Slacker and friend, and he's told me so many good things about the latest release of CentOS that I'm now seriously considering replacing my Debian installs with CentOS.
I have an armada of PCs that i can fiddle with, and I've currently installed two different versions of CentOS, one as minimal as I could, one with a default GNOME desktop. On my personal laptop I have the Red Hat Deployment Guide, as well as some more CentOS-specific docs. I have a list of 40 or so items that I will have to take care of in the following days or weeks, maybe months: "minimal install?", "yum?", "configure wireless rt2500, rt61, ipw3945?", "find extra repos for multimedia stuff?", etcetera. I just went to take a peek at IRC, and "Arrfab" told me the main communication channel for CentOS was this mailing list.
Cheers from France,
Niki Kovacs
On Tue, 15 May 2007, Niki Kovacs wrote:
I have an armada of PCs that i can fiddle with, and I've currently installed two different versions of CentOS, one as minimal as I could, one with a default GNOME desktop. On my personal laptop I have the Red Hat Deployment Guide, as well as some more CentOS-specific docs. I have a list of 40 or so items that I will have to take care of in the following days or weeks, maybe months: "minimal install?", "yum?", "configure wireless rt2500, rt61, ipw3945?", "find extra repos for multimedia stuff?", etcetera. I just went to take a peek at IRC, and "Arrfab" told me the main communication channel for CentOS was this mailing list.
Hi Niki,
I maintain an add-on repository for CentOS called RPMforge.
I'm very interested to look at the hardware issues you may have and see how we can fix them using dkms modules. Of course, fixing and packaging hardware drivers requires some investigation and guidance from you.
Let me know what I can assist you with.
Kind regards, -- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]
Dag Wieers spake the following on 5/15/2007 7:17 AM:
On Tue, 15 May 2007, Niki Kovacs wrote:
I have an armada of PCs that i can fiddle with, and I've currently installed two different versions of CentOS, one as minimal as I could, one with a default GNOME desktop. On my personal laptop I have the Red Hat Deployment Guide, as well as some more CentOS-specific docs. I have a list of 40 or so items that I will have to take care of in the following days or weeks, maybe months: "minimal install?", "yum?", "configure wireless rt2500, rt61, ipw3945?", "find extra repos for multimedia stuff?", etcetera. I just went to take a peek at IRC, and "Arrfab" told me the main communication channel for CentOS was this mailing list.
Hi Niki,
I maintain an add-on repository for CentOS called RPMforge.
I'm very interested to look at the hardware issues you may have and see how we can fix them using dkms modules. Of course, fixing and packaging hardware drivers requires some investigation and guidance from you.
Let me know what I can assist you with.
Kind regards, -- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]
Field Commander Wieers will hook you up! He has a little bit of everything. And the rest of the list is very helpful. Debian is great if you want old and stable, but CentOS is just as stable, and somewhat more current.
Welcome to the Jungle!!!
Dag Wieers a écrit :
Hi Niki,
Hi Dag,
I maintain an add-on repository for CentOS called RPMforge.
Yeah, I just discovered - and configured - it.
I'm very interested to look at the hardware issues you may have and see how we can fix them using dkms modules. Of course, fixing and packaging hardware drivers requires some investigation and guidance from you.
Besides various ATI and NVidia cards, my main issue are wireless cards, namely:
- RT2500 - RT2561 - Intel Pro 3945
I'm currently busy sinking my teeth into the CentOS docs, to get a firmer grasp of the Red Hat way to do things. This will take me a few days, maybe weeks. If not months. Right now for example, I have to rebuild my kernel - to enable one option (VESA) and disable one other (SMP, which causes the system to freeze with the rt61 driver). I know how to do this with Slackware and Debian, but I want to do it the proper Red Hat way with CentOS, which is essentially new to me.
Let me know what I can assist you with.
A very good thing to do would be to provide source RPM packages for various drivers. I don't know exactly if this is feasible, but let me give you an example. To install and configure an RT2500 wireless card with Debian, all you have to do is this:
# apt-get install module-assistant # module-assistant prepare --> this fetches all the tools necessary for compilation # apt-get install rt2500-source # module-assistant auto-install rt2500-source --> builds the module as a .deb package and installs it for the running kernel # modprobe rt2500 # ifconfig -a Etcetera... dead easy. (Well, no, dead easy is Ubuntu that already *has* all these modules available by default :o/ )
On the other hand, there seem to be way less stock kernels around with CentOS than with Debian, so featuring binary modules would be somewhat easier to maintain. I don't know.
Anyway, thanks for the kind offer of help. As we say in my native Austria: Eine Hand wäscht die andere. One hand washes the other one.
Cheers,
Niki
Hi,
On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 21:50 +0200, Niki Kovacs wrote:
days, maybe weeks. If not months. Right now for example, I have to rebuild my kernel - to enable one option (VESA) and disable one other (SMP, which causes the system to freeze with the rt61 driver).
You should know that rebuilding the kernel is strongly discouraged (and unsupported). If a driver freezes the kernel, we should preferably get the driver fixed.
A very good thing to do would be to provide source RPM packages for various drivers. I don't know exactly if this is feasible, but let me give you an example. To install and configure an RT2500 wireless card with Debian, all you have to do is this:
The RPMForge source packages are available, but this is not what you want. Dag has provided some nifty dkms driver packages. These packages compile a module for the running kernel post-install, and after booting a new kernel (e.g. after a kernel update). No more manual module compilation is necessary. While it may not be the preferred option for servers, I certainly like it elsewhere.
# apt-get install module-assistant # module-assistant prepare --> this fetches all the tools necessary for compilation # apt-get install rt2500-source # module-assistant auto-install rt2500-source --> builds the module as a .deb package and installs it for the running kernel # modprobe rt2500 # ifconfig -a Etcetera... dead easy. (Well, no, dead easy is Ubuntu that already *has* all these modules available by default :o/ )
How about
yum install nvidia-x11-drv or yum install dkms-ipw3945
? to name just two examples. Seems less cumbersome to me :).
--Daniel
Daniel de Kok a écrit :
You should know that rebuilding the kernel is strongly discouraged (and unsupported). If a driver freezes the kernel, we should preferably get the driver fixed.
Yeah, I saw that. Except I have quite a few machines that shipped with the RT2561 wireless card (not my choice). I can't ask to replace these by something better supported, because I know the answer will be "no". And according to the forum on http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com, the driver developers find it perfectly normal that the driver freezes with SMP enabled in the kernel... and expect you to build a kernel without it.
Unfortunately I have no programming skills, so I have to do with that. I know it's a PITA.
How about
yum install nvidia-x11-drv or yum install dkms-ipw3945
? to name just two examples. Seems less cumbersome to me :).
Yeah, that looks pretty nice. I'll see what it looks like in daylight. Gotta sleep.
Niki
On May 15, 2007, at 3:50 PM, Niki Kovacs wrote:
I'm currently busy sinking my teeth into the CentOS docs, to get a firmer grasp of the Red Hat way to do things. This will take me a few days, maybe weeks. If not months. Right now for example, I have to rebuild my kernel - to enable one option (VESA) and disable one other (SMP, which causes the system to freeze with the rt61 driver). I know how to do this with Slackware and Debian, but I want to do it the proper Red Hat way with CentOS, which is essentially new to me.
don't recompile your kernel to disable SMP :) if you don't already have the uniprocessor kernel installed by default, install it:
# yum install kernel-2.6.18-8.1.3.el5
then edit /etc/grub.conf to make that kernel the default, then reboot.
-steve
-- If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. - Fabian, Twelfth Night, III,v
On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 16:54 -0400, Steve Huff wrote:
don't recompile your kernel to disable SMP :) if you don't already have the uniprocessor kernel installed by default, install it:
There is no uniprocessor kernel in CentOS 5. This kernel:
# yum install kernel-2.6.18-8.1.3.el5
Is both for UP and SMP machines.
-- Daniel
-
Dag Wieers -
Daniel de Kok -
Niki Kovacs -
Ralph Angenendt -
Scott Silva -
Steve Huff