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Broken Arrow Keys during an Ubuntu 9.04 install on Vmware Server 1.X

slmingol posted this in tips & tricks on January 26th, 2010, @ 8:34 pm

Background

Recently I was trying to create a Ubuntu 9.04 vmware image using Vmware Server 1.08, but I was doing it remotely from my Fedora 10 laptop which was running Vmware Server 1.06. This can normally be done by using Vmware Server’s ability to remotely connect to other Vmware Servers.

VMware Server Console

Here’s my work flow. NOTE: Ubuntu 9.04 will be running on the vmware server on CentOS 5.4.

VMware Workflow

Problem

While going through the setup I encountered a problem I hadn’t seen before where the arrow keys didn’t appear to be working within GRUB while I was installing Ubuntu 9.04.

broken arrow keys

Solution

Turns out there is an option you can enable (i.e. set to TRUE) in the $HOME/.vmware/preferences file which fixes this.

1	xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = "TRUE"

NOTE: This change was made to the Vmware Server that was running on the Fedora 10 box.

…. Continue reading → Broken Arrow Keys during an Ubuntu 9.04 install on Vmware Server 1.X »»

Fixing Ruby Support in Vim on Fedora 10, 11, and CentOS 5 & Installing the Vim Textile plugin

slmingol posted this in tips & tricks on September 28th, 2009, @ 11:00 am

Background

A while back I was trying to get the vim textile plugin installed and ran into a problem. Apparently the vim that’s included with Fedora 10, 11, and CentOS 5 doesn’t include ruby support. This bug report explains what’s wrong with vim and how it’s missing ruby support. The problem is visible with this command:

% vim --version | grep ruby
+printer +profile +python +quickfix +reltime +rightleft -ruby +scrollbind 
...
...

The –ruby tells us that ruby support isn’t enabled. The only solution I’ve seen thus far is to rebuild vim. Not really a huge deal but it’s work non the less 8-).

Rebuilding vim with ruby support

Here’s how I fixed it.

download vim Source RPM (SRPM)

1	% wget http://mirrors.xmission.com/fedora/updates/10/SRPMS/vim-7.2.148-1.fc10.src.rpm

confirm that ruby is installed

% yum list installed ruby*|column -t|grep ruby
ruby.i386        1.8.6.287-2.fc10  installed
ruby-devel.i386  1.8.6.287-2.fc10  installed
ruby-irb.i386    1.8.6.287-2.fc10  installed
ruby-libs.i386   1.8.6.287-2.fc10  installed
ruby-rdoc.i386   1.8.6.287-2.fc10  installed

make sure you have your own rpmbuild directory

% mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS}
 
# caution with this second command if you already have your own .rpmmacros, this will overwrite!
% echo '%_topdir %(echo $HOME)/rpmbuild' > ~/.rpmmacros

rebuild vim / re-install vim

1 2	rpmbuild --rebuild vim-7.2.148-1.fc10.src.rpm rpm --force -Uvh /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/i386/vim-{c,e,m,X}*

check that vim now has ruby support

% vim --version | grep ruby
+printer +profile +python +quickfix +reltime +rightleft +ruby +scrollbind 
...
...

Ahh. a +ruby means it worked.

Textile Plugin for vim

Now onto installing the vim textile plugin.

First things first, we need to install rubygems

1	% yum install rubygems

Next we need to install the RedCloth gem, it’s required by the textile plugin

% gem install RedCloth
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed RedCloth-4.2.2
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for RedCloth-4.2.2...
Installing RDoc documentation for RedCloth-4.2.2...

Finally, install the textile plugin

Downloading the textile plugin from here,

…. Continue reading → Fixing Ruby Support in Vim on Fedora 10, 11, and CentOS 5 & Installing the Vim Textile plugin »»

[one-liner]: Determining a Hard Drive’s Manufaturer Under Fedora 10 & CentOS 5

slmingol posted this in tips & tricks on September 21st, 2009, @ 10:13 am

Background

I recently saw a post over on Linux Journal that discussed how to glean information about a system’s hard drive, such as its serial number, without having to actually open up the case and physically check it. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to write up a blog post with the specifics of how to do this under Fedora & CentOS, just so I’d have this info handy for future use.

BTW, I was able to accomplish this task several different ways, so this post will cover all the different ways that I could get this info.

Command #1: lshw

This is probably the best tool for getting at a system’s internals. First make sure it’s installed.

1	yum install lshw

For our example you would run the command lshw -class disk:

% lshw -class disk
  *-disk                  
       description: ATA Disk
       product: HTS726060M9AT00
       vendor: Hitachi
       physical id: 0
       bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sda
       version: MH4O
       serial: MRH403M4GS551Y
       size: 55GiB (60GB)
       capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
       configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=cccdcccd
  *-cdrom
       description: DVD reader
       product: UJDA755yDVD/CDRW
       vendor: MATSHITA
       physical id: 1
       bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/cdrom
       logical name: /dev/cdrw
       logical name: /dev/dvd
       logical name: /dev/scd0
       logical name: /dev/sr0
       version: 1.71
       capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd
       configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc

The first section that’s returned is called -disk. Here’s you’ll see the vendor: Hitachi, the product number, HTS726060M9AT00, and my serial number: MRH403M4GS551Y.

Command #2: smartctl

The next tool that would give this type of info is called smartctl. It’s a tool that’s part of the smartmontool package. You may be familiar with the acronym S.M.A.R.T.. The acronym stands for: Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. This is a standard that most modern disks have in which vital statistics about a disk drive are provided through a standard API. Here’s how to install it.

1	yum install smartmontools

…and once installed you can use the bundled in tool smartctl like so:

…. Continue reading → [one-liner]: Determining a Hard Drive’s Manufaturer Under Fedora 10 & CentOS 5 »»

Setting up Webex under Fedora 10

slmingol posted this in tips & tricks on July 10th, 2009, @ 1:16 am

These are some notes on how I was able to get Webex to work on my Fedora 10 laptop. Webex is a java application so to start we need to install java. I usually opt to use the real thing because I’ve never been able to get Ice Tea to successfully work with the webex app.

Installing Java

So to start I download java from java.com. Specifically I downloaded version 1.6u14. This will offer up a file, jre-6u14-linux-i586.rpm.bin. After saving that to disk you need to convert this file to it’s native RPM format. This can be accomplished with these commands.

# unpack RPM file
sh jre-6u14-linux-i586.rpm.bin
 
# install RPM
rpm -Uvh jre-6u14-linux-i586.rpm

Firefox Java Plugin

Once we have the java JRE installed we need to get the java plugin to be picked up by firefox. This can be accomplished by creating a unix link in firefox’s plugin directory, /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. Additionally I also usually create a link in my home directory, ~/.mozilla/plugin. I occasionally run into problems where firefox seems to get confused about which plugins are available when I only install them to the firefox’s main system directory, so I’ve just gotten in the habit of installing them in both directories.

# install plugin to firefox's main plugins dir
cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_14/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
 
# install plugin to user's firefox plugins dir
cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_14/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

At this point do a quick restart of firefox and you should see the plugin under the pull-down, Tools -> Addons, under the plugins tab.

java plugin added to firefox

…. Continue reading → Setting up Webex under Fedora 10 »»

Setting up a RAID During a CentOS 5 Installation

slmingol posted this in tutorials on June 20th, 2009, @ 2:18 am

Setting up a RAID can be a tricky proposition. But once you’ve gone through a couple of times it isn’t really all that hard to master. Below are some screenshots from a CentOS 5 build I recently went through to help explain how one can go about setting up a RAID-1 using 2 60GB drives. RAID-1 is 2 drives mirroring each other. I should mention that these directions should be directly applicable to a RHEL system as well as a Fedora system too.

Getting Started

First things first you need to boot the system using a CentOS DVD. Eventually you’ll get to the point where you’ll need to partition the drives, and you’ll be presented with the following screen.

initial screen - setting up partitions

Setting up the Primary Drive for the OS

Initially we need to go through and remove any pre-existing partitions that may exist on the drives. In our setup we have 3 drives. 1 is for the OS, and the other 2 drives are going to make up our RAID-1.

Here I’m removing the pre-existing partition on the hda drive, aka. the one that the OS will be installed to.

removing hda's existing partitions

I’m going to skip a bit here, but suffice to say that all I did was create a default setup of partitions on hda.

…. Continue reading → Setting up a RAID During a CentOS 5 Installation »»

Remote Installing CentOS 5 using VNC

slmingol posted this in tutorials on June 7th, 2009, @ 11:04 pm

Last month I went about “upgrading” my old fileserver, an aging Redhat 9 system to something a little bit more modern 8-), and redeploy it as a more powerful firewall box. The hardware is still very usable by today’s standards, a 1.7GHz Athlon processor, so I set about to do the installation. This system has never had a monitor permanently attached to it so I took this opportunity to try out an installation method that I had only toyed with a few times before. I’m talking about using VNC to do a remote install.

To get started I poped the CentOS 5.3 DVD in and gave this system a quick reboot. Now you know how I said this system didn’t have a monitor permanently attached. Well I lied. It does sorta kinda sorta have a monitor but it’s through a KVM switch which just so happens to be the same KVM as my primary desktop/workstation, so I didn’t want to have to keep switching back and forth, hence why I decided to do the install via VNC.

On to the install …

To start I flipped the KVM over so I could view this system’s console just to get things started. Once I got to the initial CentOS install screen I gave it a boot command like this:

1	linux vnc vncconnect=<workstation's hostname>

I then switched the KVM back to the desktop/workstation’s console and started up ssvnc in listening mode. Here’s the Options dialog from ssvnc which will configure ssvnc to start in listening mode, without any encryption.

NOTE: If you’ve never heard of ssvnc then check it out. It’s a extremely nice VNC client/server that runs on Linux, Windows, and OSX!

Once the Options dialog is set I clicked the Listen button in ssnvc’s main gui

Finally you’ll be presented with ssvnc’s transcript window

After all this I was finally presented with the initial CentOS 5 installation window.

For further details these links to dklevine.com & this redhat magazine article proved useful.

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Broken Arrow Keys during an Ubuntu 9.04 install on Vmware Server 1.X

Background

Problem

Solution

Fixing Ruby Support in Vim on Fedora 10, 11, and CentOS 5 & Installing the Vim Textile plugin

Background

Rebuilding vim with ruby support

Textile Plugin for vim

[one-liner]: Determining a Hard Drive’s Manufaturer Under Fedora 10 & CentOS 5

Background

Command #1: lshw

Command #2: smartctl

Setting up Webex under Fedora 10

Installing Java

Firefox Java Plugin

Setting up a RAID During a CentOS 5 Installation

Getting Started

Setting up the Primary Drive for the OS

Remote Installing CentOS 5 using VNC

On to the install …