Are 64-bit operating systems ready for the desktop?
by Mats Hellman on 27.Apr, 2009 under Linux, Windows
I’ve been asking myself this for a while now. 64-bit has been a standard for several years now and still computers are sold with 32-bit operating systems. Why is this?
The only reliable 64-bit OS I’ve used was my MacBook Pro which I sold. It worked and I never really had any driver issues with it. So why are PC’s still sold with XP or Vista 32-bit. XP and Vista both have 64-bit versions and still vendors don’t supply decent drivers. Why? It makes me almost mad to be using a 64-bit OS only to notice I can’t get this or that working on it since there are no drivers. Which naturally makes me ask, has Linux passed Windows in hardware compatibility when it comes to 64-bit?
I recently got my Lenovo X200s and it came with Windows Vista business 32-bit. I ran it for a while but since it had 4Gb of RAM I wanted to try out Vista Enterprise 64-bit. Vista 64 has been a ride of ups and downs. The Intel graphics controller driver keeps crashing, even after several updates and the one thing I miss the most is my Targus USB-to-Serial cable. As I work with network appliances I need a serial connection and these days it’s almost impossible to get a serial port in a laptop so the fallback is a usb-to-serial cable. Targus does not supply 64-bit drivers for the cable so I have to keep an old IBM T42 for this purpose.
What is it that makes the normally fast moving computer industry to keep on feeding the 32-bit OS? Is it really to much to ask to get drivers for my 64-bit OS?
Do you have similar feelings or does your 64-bit computer work like a charm? Please comment.
Getting wireless network working on CentOS 5 and Thinkpad T42
by Mats Hellman on 15.Dec, 2008 under Linux
I pulled an old IBM Thinkpad T42 to use as a “light” and “mobile” laptop on the daily train ride to Helsinki. It’s not new but more than usable with 768Mb RAM and CentOS 5 installed. This gives me a full development environment to work with on the train. What I noticed was the problem to get the wireless network up on this thing.
I tried editing /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, I ran iwconfig. I scanned etc. And it just didn’t want to work.
The hardware seemed to be working, but not the network settings. Why?
Google to the rescue
As always when you are troubleshooting the place to start is google.com.After reading a lot of pages, some better some worse I found NetworkManager. How could I have missed this? Later I even found a document at centos.org describing how to use this.
Using NetworkManager
Finding I should use NetworkManager I started up the service and stopped the network service. I got a list of the Wireless networks and 10 seconds later I was surfing with the wireless network.
To set NetworkManager to start automatically you should do the following
[root@localhost ~]$ service NetworkManager start
[root@localhost ~]$ chkconfig –level 2345 network off
[root@localhost ~]$ service network stop
You should now have a nice network icon in your Gnome system tray and clicking it should show the wireless networks available.
Installs
To be clear this is what I installed.
The , to get a lot of packages. And after setting up rpmforge I just pulled firmware for the network card.
This page is mostly a note for myself but if it helps someone else out then all the better.
Installing Microsoft Corefonts on CentOS 5
by Mats Hellman on 12.Dec, 2008 under Linux
This is a thing I always have to google when I need to install Microsoft’s fonts in my CentOS installs so I thought I’d post a short dirty note here to remind me how to do it.
First of all we need some tools to build ourselves the RPM for msttcorefonts, so fire up your terminal and
When finished run the following as root
[root@localhost build]$ rpmbuild -ba msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
[root@localhost build]$ rpm -ivh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
[root@localhost build]$ /sbin/service xfs reload
That’s it. You should now have Microsoft’s standard fonts installed and ready to go.
Using htaccess to create a subdomain on apache
by Mats Hellman on 20.Feb, 2008 under Linux
I’ve been thinking of starting a blog to keep my thoughts and ideas together in one place. To do this I wanted to use a simple subdomain to nixadmins.net like blog.nixadmins.net. To do this in a simple way without touching too much of the configuration I did it using the Apache’s .htaccess file.
The htaccess file can be used to many things, in this short short story I’ll only go in to creating a working subdomain. But you can find a lot more in the htaccess tutorial.
If you have a .htaccess file you can modify it, if not just create a new one in any editor.
Put the following lines in it, and of course change the values to suite your need.
RewriteEngine on
# Rewrite for Wordpress blog
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} blog.nixadmins.net
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !blog/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ blog/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
After that, create a DNS cname record, of blog.nixadmins.net that points to the same server, for me www.nixadmins.net. And you are done.
When you begin your Linux experience.
by Mats Hellman on 08.Feb, 2008 under Linux
I remember the first year I tried Linux, I was so totally hyped about it. I started by trying out server software and pretty soon I was hooked on using it. It was great, I could run my own webserver, email server, SQL server and … and … and …, well you get the point I had to try everything. The best part was that everything ran on a 120MHz Cyrix with 64Mb RAM and 8Gb hard drive. It wasn’t fast but it did get me started.
Distro shopping
First I had to go trough a really huge bunch of distributions, my friends should agree that in the beginning an Linux installation had an average lifespan of 2 days on my desktop before I moved on to the next one. There were so many to try and I’ve always been a little of a operating system freak. After a while I realized that I had to get a place to store my settings and downloads centrally because every time I reinstalled I reformatted the drives. I know I could have saved /home but back then I didn’t really care, I had a new distribution and I just had to try it. This is when I got started with my first server.
Servers and hardware
So the first server was up and it ran nicely for quite some time. Then came the hardware shopping, I just had to get a lot of hardware I could run Linux on. This resulted in a bunch of REALLY old Mac’s lying around every corner, my girlfriend wondering if I lost it and my friends probably thinking, “Well that’s what you get from running Linux”. After I had installed Linux on almost every old Mac I got the hunger was still there, I had to try something else, so I got myself a Sun SPARCStation 5.
It had 110Mhz microSPARC II processor, 128 Mb RAM, 1Gb hard drive, 21″ Sun monitor. As you might guess it wasn’t really a nice desktop but eventually I had it running Debian as a development and test server. It was a stable little server but it really lacked power of a modern computer, no wonder since it was released in the 1990’s.
Look where it got me
I sometimes wonder how much I’ve paid the electric company for my servers running 24/7 at home and how much I’ve put money in this process but I then quickly remind myself that any hobby costs money and it eventually pushed me into IT where I work now.
To the point
What inspired me to write this little post was this short video bellow that really reminds me of myself back in the early stages of my Linux experience. I hope you have as much fun watching it as I did.
