Jerry Franz wrote:

For a new laptop your best hope for a successful native install is probably Ubuntu 10.10. Laptops in particular are difficult platforms for hardware support and CentOS5 is not 'cutting edge'. If you want CentOS on it to work well, you will probably need to wait for CentOS6 - which could be a month or two.

I'm eagerly waiting for Centos 6. Is so refreshingly nice to use a real computer operating system. It reminds me of the good old mainframe days long before MS-DOS 1.

Thank you for the recommendation. I'll have a look at Ubuntu.

Mark suggested http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath9k/RHEL5 which might solve the problem and produce a working Centos wifi.

Centos is not 'cutting-edge'. It's just solid, reliable, plain boring and just works. Everything a good computer system should be.

An alternative I've used is to install VMware Workstation on top of Windows and install Linux into a VM. Running fullscreen the practical difference is nil. Then you by and large get the laptop hardware support gratis from the windows layer including things like wireless and video drivers drivers.

I'll keep that as a back-up option.

Thank you very much.

Best regards,

Paul. GB.

Always Learning wrote:

Mark wrote:-

...

About 5 years ago, I had to install a wireless card in my tower, and it's an ATH9xx, I *think* - I can check this evening, if that's

relevant. I

...

was running SuSE, and had to find drivers from madwifi. A few minutes of googling found... http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath9k/RHEL5, where the module's been backported to RHEL5.

Golly !

I'm a Linux novice (started last June). Can I literally install one of those rpm on the laptop and that should, hopefully, cure everything ?

One should hope. An rpm - R(edhat)P(ackage)M(anager) are packages of files, with configuration, etc, run during the install, meaning you should only need minor tweaks, if at all, to the configuration files to have them go. Kernel modules, AFAIK, during the install, are usually autoconfigured to load.

Thank you very much. I would prefer a Centos solution and then everything is the same O/S and simpler to maintain.

You do understand the relationship of CentOS to RHEL, right?

mark

Chiming in I find CentOs VERY stable. I need this for my User community (Wife and Daughter) It has to look and work the same always. For the new people to Linux I've noted that NT admins can very easily install ubuntu and get it running (for awhile). From what I remember it had a Windozie feel. Coming from the Solaris, AIX, and HP world I prefer stability. -- Thanks,

Gene Brandt SCSA 8625 Carriage Road River Ridge, LA 70123

home 504-737-4295

cell 504-452-3250

Family Web Page | My Web Page | LinkedIn | Facebook | Resumebucket

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 19:20 +0000, Always Learning wrote:

Mark Roth wrote:

...

You do understand the relationship of CentOS to RHEL, right?

Right :-)

Once upon a time Red Hat was free. Then they decided to exist purely on support fees. Meanwhile a bunch of supporters invented a downstream variant called Centos. They worked very hard to remove all the Red Hat branding and recompile (is that the correct Linux term?) the software. There was so ugly goings on which were publicised but eventually resolved. The other downstream variant is called Scientific Linux and that is a joint collaboration between Europe's CERN and it's USA equivalent Fermilab.

Then one day a big bad wolf called Oracle of very expensive Oracle SQL fame swallowed Red Hat, like they swallowed MySQL, Solaris, Open Office and Visual Box. The long term future for these is uncertain.

Pure Centos is identical to Red Hat. However various repositories offer extras and variants which make the installed Centos slightly different from Red Hat. One can sometimes install some Fedora items into Centos.

Centos is great.

Will that do ?

Where did I say that! "From what I remember it had a Windozie feel" In MY opinion ( only an opinion) Winblows will never be stable.

-- Thanks,

Gene Brandt SCSA 8625 Carriage Road River Ridge, LA 70123

home 504-737-4295

cell 504-452-3250

Family Web Page | My Web Page | LinkedIn | Facebook | Resumebucket

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 15:04 -0500, Brian Mathis wrote:

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Gene Brandt brandtg@bellsouth.net wrote:

...

Chiming in I find CentOs VERY stable. I need this for my User community (Wife and Daughter) It has to look and work the same always. For the new people to Linux I've noted that NT admins can very easily install ubuntu and get it running (for awhile). From what I remember it had a Windozie feel. Coming from the Solaris, AIX, and HP world I prefer stability.

Thanks, Gene Brandt SCSA

I need to call you on this one. "Windozie" (implying some kind of decent user interface) and "stability" are not mutually exclusive, as your comment suggests. In the old days you may have had to choose, but that's long past. Windows 7 is very stable, as is Mac OS X.

This is the type of false dichotomy that a certain US-based news network (rhymes with Blox Fews) uses to misinform a naive public. Please don't bring that kind of "logic" into tech discussions. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On Tuesday, January 25, 2011 12:21:35 pm m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

I've got 7 on my work laptop, and my lady's got Vista at home. I *despise* both of them: they do their best to hide what you need to do, if it's anything other than looking at pictures, playing music, email, and web. And, IMO, part of the time they have problems with that.

We won't even *begin* to talk about how the work laptop is so locked down that even wtih a local admin account, I can't do almost anything....

     mark, yes, I do loathe WinDoze

When did this become a Windows discussion list?

Sure, I loathe Windows, too. (until I want to play a game!) But I'm not here to read about Windows' many faults....

compdoc wrote:

Any version of Windows is stable - its only when ppl start adding the pretty butterfly screen savers, or open email attachments that things go wrong.

It is very vulnerable, especially IE, but with a little education, preventive steps, and decent backups, the majority of businesses in the world that use it manage fine..

Hah. Hah. And hah. Feel free to talk to me offlist about what I went through, for example, to use a barcode scanner, or to install ocsinventory.

mark

I do IT for local businesses in Denver. I build workstations and servers, do hardware upgrades, networking, VPNs, firewalls, virtual machines - anything a business might need. Windows and linux.

Any tech worth his salt will have learned how windows works and how to repair it. It is possible to repair.

Same is true of any Linux technician.

My first 'real' computer was a Fat Mac, so I still love a good GUI. And Windows has a nice GUI.

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 16:01 -0500, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

processing power of a mid-nineties Cray supercomputer... and they run like an 8088 (ok, maybe an 80286), just for all the eye candy: style, not content.

Give me the good old 6502 any day and its mainframe predecessor with a 36 bit word which was 4 Ascii or 6 BCD characters.

On 01/25/2011 03:04 PM, Brian Mathis wrote:

I need to call you on this one. "Windozie" (implying some kind of decent user interface) and "stability" are not mutually exclusive, as your comment suggests. In the old days you may have had to choose, but that's long past. Windows 7 is very stable, as is Mac OS X.

This is the type of false dichotomy that a certain US-based news network (rhymes with Blox Fews) uses to misinform a naive public. Please don't bring that kind of "logic" into tech discussions.

I have to agree here as well. Too many times do I see people just blasting other operating systems for these reasons. I'd even go as far as argue that Windows XP is stable too, so long as it's managed, administered, and setup securely and correctly.

I don't notice any more crashes on the Ubuntu systems I have set up, compared to those of CentOS/RHEL, or to even Windows XP and 7 systems. And I administer all of the above in the same network. People mix these perceptions up all to frequently, or personally because I simply believe they like to bash other operating systems that they don't like or want to use.

Just my 0.02 cents.

Regards, Max

On 1/25/2011 2:49 PM, Rob Kampen wrote:

So what happens when one does the monthly tuesday patches for windoze and your security door controller running on SQLserver (micro$oft) fails. Back out all the patches - inform micro$oft - wait - wait some more - never get a response - call the security software vendor - aware of patch problem - no fix planned - buy the newest version. All this on a stable windoze XP prof. Dell box. $$$$ that's all that matters.

Running XP as a server??? You do know there are Windows server products, right?

On 01/25/2011 03:49 PM, Rob Kampen wrote:

So what happens when one does the monthly tuesday patches for windoze and your security door controller running on SQLserver (micro$oft) fails. Back out all the patches - inform micro$oft - wait - wait some more - never get a response - call the security software vendor - aware of patch problem - no fix planned - buy the newest version. All this on a stable windoze XP prof. Dell box. $$$$ that's all that matters.

Windows aside, my point was that I see it far to often from people that just because something is "pretty" or has the "windozie" feel, they automatically dismiss it as a non-stable product.

Take Ubuntu for example, it has the prettiness and all the GUI tools, which is what attracts desktop users, but then you have those that say it's not stable and is too cutting edge because of that reason. I personally don't find it to be the case, but that's my experience with working with it. Every OS has an application, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

Running CentOS for normal user desktops didn't yield good results for me, where Ubuntu did and fit that purpose. Or running Windows XP as a server, where a Windows Server 2003/2008 instance should be. A lot of it is decision making for what is trying to be done. Too many are narrow minded about this kind of stuff, because they don't want to work with something different, or with what is out of their comfort zone.

My point was to not fall into that mind frame of "GUI" is bad or bleeding edge and doesn't work, and therefor is automatic crap. That is certainly not the case. I've seen GUI tools be refused to be used simply because they are GUI tools, and to me that's not 2011 type thinking.

Personally, I run CentOS on my laptop. I also like all the guifications, so I spend lots of time setting that GUI pretty feel up for myself. Since my employer runs a lot of RHEL/CentOS on servers, I want and like to have a system similar to use, but I also like my desktop eye candy too.

But I also run Ubuntu, SuSE, and Windows. If systems are properly applied to the appropriate applications, and set up and managed correctly, then I don't have problems running many kinds of operating systems. I don't fall victim to the religion of one operating system, I use many kinds to get my job done that I'm paid to do.

Again, just my 0.02 cents as I was backing Brian's comments about the divide between thinking "nice user interface" can't be said in the same sentence as a "stable" platform to use.

Regards, Max

At Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:45:44 -0500 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:

Always Learning wrote:

...

Mark Roth wrote:

...

You do understand the relationship of CentOS to RHEL, right?

Right :-)

Once upon a time Red Hat was free. Then they decided to exist purely on

Actually, you were supposed to buy the CDs, which I did (I really suppose I can get rid of my 5.2, 6, 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 CDs.... <g>). They weren't expensive. However, after 9 (shrike), they'd already become the distro of choice for business use in the US (it was SuSE in Europe), and they rebranded their main branch "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", to make PHB's feel warm and fuzzy.

...

support fees. Meanwhile a bunch of supporters invented a downstream variant called Centos. They worked very hard to remove all the Red Hat branding and recompile (is that the correct Linux term?) the software.

Yes, you compile *real* software <g>. My description is they file off the serial numbers (and remove the proprietary stuff), then rebuild the whole shebang.

...

There was so ugly goings on which were publicised but eventually resolved. The other downstream variant is called Scientific Linux and that is a joint collaboration between Europe's CERN and it's USA equivalent Fermilab.

No, Fermilab and ->its<-* equivalent, CERN.

...

Then one day a big bad wolf called Oracle of very expensive Oracle SQL fame swallowed Red Hat, like they swallowed MySQL, Solaris, Open Office and Visual Box. The long term future for these is uncertain.

Um, no, not sure where you got that. Oracle bought a license, or something, from RH, and rebranded it, with changes as a VAR, Oracle Unbreakable Linux. RH is still its* company, not owned by Oracle in any way.

Right. Oracle bought *Sun Microsystems*. (Sun Microsystems had come onto 'hard times'.) Sun Microsystems owned the Solaris O/S (originally SunOS), and provided the major support for MySQL and Open Office. Now Oracle owns the Solaris O/S and is in the position of providing major support for MySQL and Open Office. Since MySQL is a nominal Open Source 'competitor' of Oracle's (closed source) DB, it is uncertain what Oracle will do with MySQL (or what the MySQL developers will do, etc.). Oracle's owner is just as much anti-Microsoft as the former owner/founder of Sun Microsystems, so it is likely that Oracle will continue to support Open Office (if only as a anti-Microsoft gesture).

...

Pure Centos is identical to Red Hat. However various repositories offer extras and variants which make the installed Centos slightly different from Red Hat. One can sometimes install some Fedora items into Centos.

Yup on the latter, but mostly older fedora, which is bleeding edge.

<snip> mark

• These notes brought to you in behalf of the Professional Organization of

English Majors, who want to remind you that it's == it is, and is not the possessive whatchamacallit, "its", as in it's got a shoe on its foot.

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

Mark wrote:

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 11:45 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote: :

...

• These notes brought to you in behalf of the Professional Organization

of English Majors, who want to remind you that it's == it is, and is not the possessive whatchamacallit, "its", as in it's got a shoe on its foot.

So, "it is got a shoe on its foot?"

Hmm....

Right, but I wasn't the English major, y'know.... It can also be "it has".

mark "defeet went over defence before detail"

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 14:25 -0800, Benjamin Smith wrote:

On Tuesday, January 25, 2011 11:20:34 am Always Learning wrote:

...

Then one day a big bad wolf called Oracle of very expensive Oracle SQL fame swallowed Red Hat, like they swallowed MySQL, Solaris, Open Office and Visual Box. The long term future for these is uncertain.

Whaaa...? Facts would seem otherwise.... Here's an article from just a few months ago!

http://www.glgroup.com/News/Oracle-to-Red-Hat--Its-Not-Your-Fathers-Linux- Market-Anymore-51058.html

Thank you. Happily I got the 'swallowed Red Hat' wrong. Sadly the long term future for Red Hat, MySQL, Open Office and Visual Box is certainly uncertain.

I've seen the changes in the computer world first-hand for 43 years staring when there were no screens, no keyboards and no disks although one installation, a KDF9, did have a magnetic drum. Everything changes. Computer companies and software change, evolve and then eventually disappear. It's 'computer evolution'.

What is noticeable is the vast number of organisations failing to use computers properly - not extracting the maximum benefit from their computer systems and running incompatible systems which can not exchange basic data. In the UK in 2011 A.D. local authorities (councils) and the territorial police forces operate this way. Despite vast computer budgets, and a supporting bureaucracy which includes computer managers lacking any of the skills possessed by participants on this mailing list, important decisions appear to be made by morons usually assisted by consultants whose shinny shoes and expensive suits are much more conspicuous than technical acumen.

Gone are the days when an in-house team of programmers and analysts would design and code customised programmes that fully satisfied the business needs of the organisations. The intelligence services and scientific research are exceptions. In the commercial sphere it is M$ and Oracle applications (especially Oracle Financials) plus proprietary software from third parties. The number of 'computer experts' that know only how to press the correct key in a M$ application yet lack any appreciation of how computer systems work or the logic behind them is increasing.

Linux, the BSDs and Solaris continue the good tradition of 'real' computing while expensive Apple demonstrates how good Windoze could be if M$ really tried.

Will we one day be dependent on open source Chinese Linux if Western open source Linux dries-up ?

On Wed, 2011-01-26 at 13:27 +0800, Christopher Chan wrote:

Surely you mean stuff from the rising sun Illumos and OpenIndiana!

Nope. Not convinced by what I read about them.

Still have my unused Open Solaris disks from 2008.05 and my single CD of Red Hat Linux v.6 from 1999. :-)

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 05:37:48AM +0000, Always Learning wrote:

On Wed, 2011-01-26 at 13:27 +0800, Christopher Chan wrote:

...

Surely you mean stuff from the rising sun Illumos and OpenIndiana!

Nope. Not convinced by what I read about them.

Still have my unused Open Solaris disks from 2008.05 and my single CD of Red Hat Linux v.6 from 1999. :-)

Well, FreeBSD is still free from corporate control and interference.

////jerry

--

With best regards,

Paul. England, EU.

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org From: m.roth@5-cent.us Subject: Re: [CentOS] Recommendation for a Linux alternative to Centos - ATH9K disaster

Always Learning wrote:

<snip> > After 8 hours on Saturday I could sometimes see hubs in the > neighbourhood but could not connect to my own hub using WPA2. > > iwlist wlan0 scan > > produced technical details of local hubs - but still could not connect. > NetworkManager sometimes froze. > > Spent many hours Googling for his wifi adaptor Altheros AR928K which > uses a driver known as ATH9K. Many others have had a similar problem. > Kernel 2.6.27 apparently includes this driver but Centos 5.5 is 2.6.18.

I came from Fedora 10 to Centos, and the learning curve was basically a flat line. Using Centos is like stepping back in time to FC8 for me.

So I recommend Fedora as it's cutting edge, and I had no major problems apart from not being able to print from Java apps - but that got sorted a long time ago AFAIR.

Kind Regards,

Keith

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Always Learning wrote: <snip>

Thanks for the Ubuntu recommendation. I tend to buy the DVD's and install from them. I have VBox running Win98SE on a Centos desktop because I want to run software and applications from 1992 (my own DOS Cobol database) which also runs in DosBox, 1993 (my customised Ami Pro

Why not install gcc, and recompile your COBOL for Linux? <g> <snip>

mark, pulling a brown paper bag over his head before admitting to having written a *lot* of COBOL back before I got to Unix

On 01/25/11 8:49 PM, Always Learning wrote:

Cobol was the second language I leaned in 1967 from a hardware manufacturer's tutor who didn't have a clue. The first was Easycoder (an assembler type) which I loved.

do you mean autocoder? that was the 'assembler' on the IBM 1400 series

-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Brian Mathis Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 7:03 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Recommendation for a Linux alternative to Centos - ATH9K disaster

CentOS is great for servers, but absolutely not for a new person you're trying to get to try Linux. This approach actually hurts Linux since people think "oh I tried Linux and it sucked".

My 50+-year-old and technically very unsavvy mother manages CentOS just fine on her computer. The trick is to use the Redmond theme...

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 13:12 -0500, Robert Heller wrote:

At Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:49:39 +0000 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:

...

Anyone any idea what kernel version Centos 6 will have ?

Probably whatever Fedora Core 12 (?) has. Whether this will work on your friend's laptop is uncertain.

2.6.31 Linux kernel, Kernel 2.6.32 was pushed to updates repository on 27 February 2010

But no Gnome 3 just 2.28

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_%28operating_system%29#Fedora_12

On Wednesday, January 26, 2011 12:41 PM, Barry Brimer wrote:

Quoting Always Learningcentos@g7.u22.net:

...

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 13:12 -0500, Robert Heller wrote:

...

At Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:49:39 +0000 CentOS mailing listcentos@centos.org

wrote:

...

...

Anyone any idea what kernel version Centos 6 will have ?

My RHEL 6 machine (fully updated) has kernel 2.6.32-71.14.1.

Alright, that's it, I want Centos 6 now!

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 14:49 -0500, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

Benjamin Smith wrote:

...

On my hard disk, I have my /home, /boot, and / directories each on their own partitions, and when I'm upgrading my Fedora, I just format / and

/boot,

...

and leave /home alone. Although I've transfered it a few times between hard

Yep. ALWAYS have /home on its own partition. You *might* want /opt on its own, also. For more on my views on this, here's my copy of the article I had published a few years ago in SysAdmin (now defunct, unfortunately) http://24.5-cent.us/upgrading_linux.doc

Thanks for the good advice. I wondered why the installer gave those choices. Now it makes sense. All my production data resides on /data and I tend to leave the standard directories alone but I did create a /root/bin and put in it simple commands like

.l # /bin/bash ls -al

.f # /bin/bash find / -iwholename *$1

.fs # /bin/bash find /data -iwholename *$1 find /ax -iwholename *$1 find /bx -iwholename *$1 find /cx -iwholename *$1

Obviously with the chmod +x. The last one makes searching times much faster when seeking non-operating system files.

Because I'm lazy or perhaps because I firmly believe the computer should do the work for the people not vice versa, I did some links (ln -s) for service and some copies of ipt tables etc. so I can quickly type

sv ipt status

ipt -I .....

ipt -nvL

Command lines are like what computers used to be like. You know with a fast but noisy Teletype banging-out text at 75 baud or a luxury terminal running at a staggeringly fast 300 baud giving a top speed of 30 characters a second.

On Wed, 2011-01-26 at 09:58 -0500, Brian Mathis wrote:

You may not be aware of the "locate" command? Nightly there is a job that runs (updatedb) that scans the disk and saves file locations. Locate searches this database instead of you have to do a 'find'. The only thing it won't get are files that were added since the last 'updatedb' run. You can run that whenever you want to update the db, or use find in those cases.

Thanks for the explanation. Now I know why locate never usually worked for me - it hadn't updated.

find is fast, especially when I restrict the search paths.

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 2:56 AM, John Hodrien J.H.Hodrien@leeds.ac.uk wrote:

On Thu, 27 Jan 2011, Always Learning wrote:

...

Thanks for the explanation. Now I know why locate never usually worked for me - it hadn't updated.

find is fast, especially when I restrict the search paths.

But locate is faster still, in all but the smallest of cases.  I'd only tend to use find if I had reason to think that changes had made the locate database invalid.  locate with a regexp is plain good and fast.

Yeah, way back in yesteryear under UNIX, the "find" and the "locate" tools were part of one package. Under RHEL/CentOS, locate is in the "mlocate" package, and some folks making stripped servers rip it out to avoid storing the database. (Think embedded OS's and NFS hosted / and /var partitions.)

One *does* have to remember the "mlocate" package's limitations. It doesn't browse network mounted directories, it doesn't browse /tmp or look for other excluded targets, and it runs with the nightly cron jobs. So if you're looking for files in /var/tmp/ or an NFS share, or files that were created an hour ago, well, it's back to "find".

I have found it very useful, when checking updates on a machine, to become root and run the "updatedb" command to get the mlocate database updated.

On Fri, 2011-01-28 at 14:50 +0000, John Hodrien wrote:

All configurable via /etc/updatedb.conf if your local needs differ.

How does one remove it ?

yum erase updated ?

It is not present in any CRON.

On Fri, 2011-01-28 at 16:36 +0100, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:

yes it is: /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron

No trace. That is probably why it never worked for me.

With best regards,

Paul. England, EU.

On Fri, 2011-01-28 at 15:36 +0000, John Hodrien wrote:

If it's installed, it should have a cron job here:

/etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron

The package is called mlocate, as has already been mentioned in this thread.

Appears not to have been installed. No trace of anything in /var/lib either.

With best regards,

Paul. England, EU.

Always Learning wrote, On 01/28/2011 10:25 AM:

On Fri, 2011-01-28 at 14:50 +0000, John Hodrien wrote:

...

All configurable via /etc/updatedb.conf if your local needs differ.

How does one remove it ?

yum erase updated ?

It is not present in any CRON.

There is a new cron in town. :) It's name is anacron, and it runs beside|[in addition to] the old cron but with different config files. anacron has some neat features such as, if your box has been of for several days, then ~1 hour after it powers up any missed jobs get ran.

/etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron /etc/anacrontab /etc/updatedb.conf

ls /etc/cron.*

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Kai Schaetzl maillists@conactive.com wrote:

updatedb is not a daemon or package. It's run by cron automatically in the night once you install slocate.

Kai

In CentOS 5.x, and RHEL 5.x, it's in the "mlocate" package.