Archive for August, 2009

Skype 2.1 Beta for Linux

Friday, August 28th, 2009

After quite a while, Skype has released a new version of their client for Linux (2.1 Beta). It FINALLY supports PulseAudio without having to tweak your whole sound system…It’s supported for Fedora 9+, Ubuntu 8+, Debian Lenny and OpenSUSE 11+.

Get the new version here.

Should yum/PackageKit go the Solaris way?

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

Recently I got a new job as a sysadmin in a company running Solaris 10 servers. I’m not really used to this OS, so I’ve ordered some books and read a ton of articles about it. As always, it’s quite a challenge to switch from one OS to another; you have to learn its way of doing things, its admin tools, its legacy…

Solaris 10 feels particularly old compared to modern Linux distros  like Fedora or enterprise-class Linux distros like CentOS/RHEL, but there are also a couple of very cool technologies included. This blog post is probably the first of a series dedicated to Linux -> Solaris migrations, and how we can learn things from Solaris to improve Linux.

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Quake Live available for Linux and OSX

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Good news! Quake Live is available for Linux and OSX since yesterday. For those who don’t know what it is, imagine Quake III playable in your browser with a simple Firefox/Safari plugin. Oh, and it’s free too. http://www.quakelive.com

New 64-Bit Flash plugin from Adobe

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

I didn’t notice it before, but Adobe has released a new version of their 64-Bit Flash plugin for Linux. I quote: “The 64-bit Flash Player 10 alpha refresh for Linux was released on July 30, 2009.”

Grab it on the Adobe Labs page and follow my instructions on this blogpost to install it. these instructions are valid for Fedora 10, 11 and basically any 64-Bit Linux OS.

CentOS 5.3 on HP DL380G6 NIC weirdness

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Recently I ordered a new server for my company, a HP DL380G6 to be precise. We already have the previous generation of these servers (G5) and are very happy about them.  It’s a beast with 5 network cards (4 usable by the OS, 1 for ILO management); in our setup we only need one active NIC, so I went to the BIOS and deactivated all NICs except the first one…then I installed CentOS 5.3.

I’m not really sure about it, but there seems to be a bug in the current BIOS revision which has a rather annoying consequence: if you only activate ONE NIC in the BIOS, the OS can’t see it. As soon as you activate 2+ NICs, the OS sees all of them. And by “see” I mean that they even don’t show up in an “lspci”… Odd. This probably also happens on RHEL 5.3, which is an officially supported OS by HP on this machine.

Here are the culprits:

02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)
02:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)