EuroBSDCon 2009 has started

Day one of EuroBSDCon 2009 is already over — it was the tutorials session day. Tomorrow the talks session will start and probably it will be the peak of the conference.

I'm eagerly waiting for some of the talks tomorrow. Especially that some of them are from the enterprise/business perspective that I'm researching now for the EnterpriseBSD project. Like, say, "How FreeBSD finds oil" and quite a lot of the rest of the talks in "Stream A". Too bad I won't be able to join the Conference Dinner (booked out).

Will be posting more news tomorrow evening...

Running oldie VMware Server 1.0.x on latest Ubuntu

If you're like me and hate to get along with the VMware Server 2.x resource hog then you will want to go for the older and more streamlined VMware Server 1.0.x (you will also get a real console client too).
Now if you do that on the modern Ubuntu distros then you will step into some troubles (Server 1.0.x shows its age). Most of them can be solved following the tips here (performance tips included!). However here are some more hidden gems:

• The latest 2.6.27 kernels have some changes which break the building of the VMware kernel modules (stub sources are really old anyway); use the patcher here (yes, it works for Server too).
• At least the MUI component assumes that /bin/sh is Bash, which on Ubuntu is really dash — this in turn will break setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment and apache will complain for missing libraries; correct the shebang magig at the top of the initialisation file /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware.

Good luck. And don't forget that 1.0.x is really old and already obsoleted by VMware in favor of 2.0.x...

Network messup in Ubuntu Jaunty when using VMware

While I was testing a brand new Ubuntu Jaunty (9.10 alpha) installation on my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop to checkout whether it better reacts to the suspend issue, I stumbled over another problem: after installing VMware Workstation the network setup would get messed up at every boot requiring manual tweaking.

It turns out that the NetworkManager service, in its great wisdom, was trying to automatically initialize the vmnet1/vmnet8 virtual interfaces created by VMware (it's using them as network injection points for the VM machines and they are managed by the vmware startup script). That means running the DHCP client over them and acquiring some garbage IP settings (these settings are supposed to be acquired by the contained VMware virtual machines, not by the physical box!). Subsequently this was installing a phoney VMware default route and DNS server entries, overriding the expected wireless settings, which in turn renders networking useless.

It seems this new behavior may have been triggered by a change in the [un]managed mode of the NetworkManager service in Ubuntu Jaunty. However, trying to change the managed=true/false statement in /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf yielded no results.

Luckily you can easily fix this by adding specific configuration files in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ to prevent NetworkManager from touching the VMware network interfaces. You can use the following commands (assuming you kept the default interface numbering):

cat > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/vmnet1 << EOF
[connection]
id=vmnet1
autoconnect=false
EOF

cat > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/vmnet8 << EOF
[connection]
id=vmnet8
autoconnect=false
EOF

RF Kill switch, Suspend and other demons on Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Li 2735

Some time ago I have bought a cheap Fujitsu-Siemens (AMILO Li 2735 model) laptop on a refurbish sale. I don't know whether it was the smartest idea, it looks like the guys at Fujitsu Siemens had nothing else but Windows Vista in mind when they designed this spartan model :-/ ...

My first problem was the software wireless/RF killswitch which works with Vista after installing Fujitsu-Simenes drivers (you need to press Fn+F1), but not out of the box on Linux/others OS'es. The not-so-obvious solution to this problem was to use the acerhk module.

The second problem was that the CPU (T5450 1.66Ghz): while it's a Core 2 Duo CPU, it lacks the virtualization support needed to run 64bit OS'es under VMware (among the last ones not supporting Intel VT). Well, I guess it's just my bad luck for this one...

Now the third problem that I'm struggling with is that suspending in Ubuntu is broken, and I have tried both 8.10 and 9.04 alpha. The weird thing is that if I boot from the LiveCD suspending works (although not too many times, SquashFS errors keep accumulating), but if I boot from an installation made from the very same LiveCD then I have no chance to correctly resume from suspend — it's doing a weird "powerup/powerdown/powerup/hang" cycle. There is a bug filed for the (similar) Li 2732 model which was at one point closed as fixed in the Jaunty alpha versions when tested from the LiveCD but I had to reopen it since it doesn't work from an HDD install...

If any of you has some ideas for this issue please leave me a comment. Thanks.

Using EPEL repositories in CentOS (and spinoffs alike)

If you are looking for various popular packages to install in CentOS (and for that matter also RHEL) but you do not find them in the default installed yum repositories, then you can add the Fedora EPEL repositories. For CentOS 5.3 you should be running something like this under root:

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

If you were wondering, EPEL stands for "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" and, quoting their FAQ, this is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs, such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.

Linus got his own blog...

Well, the man behind the Linux kernel (I was prepared to say "the Linux prima donna") has given up into blogging recently. You can find his blog here.

Personally I hope there will be more technical bits than kids and dogs pictures, but hey, it's his blog. Maybe this will render him (and all nerds alike) a bit more human ? :-)

Ubuntu Heyron: i810 beats intel driver ?

I'm not sure why, but ever since I upgraded my x86-64 installation to Ubuntu 8.04, all applications (but especially Firefox in particular) would spot a dramatical display slowdown, although CPU was not loaded.

Well, ever since switching from the default "intel" video driver to the "i810" driver, things have gone back to normal. This makes me think that the new/official "intel" driver is yet to become
what the old i810 one has still to offer...