Category: Systems

All systems related posts

You need to have read/write permissions to /dev/dri/cardX to benefit from 3D hardware acceleration in Xorg X Server. On a Gentoo linux machine, this file has the following permissions set by default :

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ls -l /dev/dri/card0 
crw-rw---- 1 root video 226, 0 2009-10-14 16:12 /dev/dri/card0

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The Xorg X Server can now rely on HAL to get information about the hardware the machine is running. This allows the X Server to auto-configure most of its components such as keyboard / mouse / screen / graphic adapter. But there is still room for tweaking it if needed.

This post explains how to configure extra properties for a keyboard at the HAL level, so that X Server will correctly auto-configure it for you.

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I have 3 hard disks in SATA-to-eSATA external enclosure which I occasionally need to plug to perform backups and to unplug when done. I found it annoying to have to restart the whole computer at every turn, especially when SATA is supposed to bring hotplug abilities. If you mainboard / SATA chipset and disks support hot plugging and unplugging, you can do this by following those instructions.
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This post is a step by step explanation about how to get an OpenSolaris 2008.11 run as a Xen DomU on a Linux Dom0.
To follow this, you’ll need a Linux machine ready for Xen (I run Xen 3.3.0), with vncviewer installed.

This post doesn’t explain the basics of Xen, so you might want to start by learning Xen if you don’t already know a bit of it.

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If you need to identify broken symlinks, you can do the following :
find -L . -type l

The -L options instructs find to follow symlinks when possible. Hence no “working symlink” will ever get returned as the targets won’t match -type l (meaning “file is a symlink”).

On the other hand, find will not be able to follow broken symlinks, so the information will be taken from the symlink itself and not from the non-existent or otherwise unreachable target. The -type l will then be a match and the broken symlink filename will be returned.

Case solved

Thanks to the “Ferg’s Gaff” blog (especially the comments) for showing the way !

In this post I’ll cover the basics one needs to know to install, upgrade and remove packages on a Gentoo linux system. read this entry »

I’ve recently switched to the Gentoo Linux distribution (mostly to experiment with this Linux distro) and I don’t regret it so far. This post is about my first impressions about Gentoo.

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I’m trying to install xen on Ubuntu 8.04.1 and here is what I get :

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spaghetti% sudo apt-get install ubuntu-xen-server
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
ubuntu-xen-server: Depends: python-xen-3.2 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: xen-utils-3.2 but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages
spaghetti%

I’ve tried to follow the package dependencies but without success. As for now I’m growing tired of Ubuntu and I’m considering moving away to a more robust distribution … I’d be glad to hear your point of view about that too.

If you have multiple linux kernels with differents options in the command line in your bootloader (grub, lilo or other) and you wonder which one was used to boot, you can find out by looking in /proc/cmdline. Ex :

[root@picolo:~]# cat /proc/cmdline
ro root=LABEL=/
[root@picolo:~]#

To know what directories are exported by a NFS server, you can use the showmount -e nfs_server from a NFS client.

[root@client:~]# showmount -e server
Export list for server:
/data/dir1        (everyone)
/data/dir2     client1 client2 client3

(The /data/dir2 is exported only to specified clients)