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Using CentOS 5 Repositories with RHEL 5

Well a few people, like myself, are running RHEL 5 but dont have the money to continue to pay for RHN subscription, meaning “Yum install X” wont work. This is rather irritating, as you will need to hobble around the internet looking to find and install the RPM and all of its dependencies manually, not bad for when your learning but a real pain after the first 50 times!

There is a way however, to keep your mind from self-destructing. You can use the repositories of CentOS 5, RHEL 5′s open source brother, to allow yum to work (as they are very similar, you can point to the Centos repositories as opposed to the RHEL ones and they will still work 99% of the time).

Below is how i have managed to do this.

Firstly, you will need to disable the RHN Plugin, by using:rpm -e yum-rhn-plugin

Secondly, you will need to go into /etc/yum.repos.d and use an editor such as gedit, vi, nano etc on the file “rhel-debuginfo.repo” which will bring up the config (do this by typing “gedit rhel-debuginfo.repo” in Command line).

Finally, copy and paste the following config:

[rhel-debuginfo]
name=Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever – $basearch – Debug
baseurl=ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/$releasever/en/os/$basearch/Debuginfo/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release
[base]
name=CentOS-5 – Base
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=5&arch=i386&repo=os
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

#released updates
[updates]
name=CentOS-5 – Updates
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=5&arch=i386&repo=updates
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/centos/5/os/i386/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

#packages used/produced in the build but not released
[addons]
name=CentOS-5 – Addons
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=5&arch=i386&repo=addons
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/centos/5/os/i386/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

#additional packages that may be useful
[extras]
name=CentOS-5 – Extras
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=5&arch=i386&repo=extras
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/centos/5/os/i386/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

#additional packages that extend functionality of existing packages
[centosplus]
name=CentOS-5 – Plus
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=5&arch=i386&repo=centosplus
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/centos/5/os/i386/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

After you have done this, save your config and exit your text editor.

Go into command line once again, and type “yum update” and your repositories will be ready to go.

Tags: CentOS, Repositories, RHEL

Windows 7 Blog Announced

A blog has finally appeared from the guys behind the development of Microsofts hush-hush OS, Windows 7. The blog can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/08/14/welcome.aspx

There isnt much interesting on it at the moment – mainly introductions, what we intend to achieve, etc. However after the couple of Microsoft forums which are coming up in the future, its safe to assume that more details will follow. One such rumour is that Microsoft are set to take advantage of Jeff Han’s multi-touch research by building the technology into their Operating System (Jeff Hans research page is here http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/) 

There is a video of the technology here http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid713271701/bclid713073346/bctid709364416 While Microsoft may claim this as new, this technology has been around now for nearly 3 years – i remember Matt sending me a link to their video at the beginning of 2006. It is fascinating yes, but at the same time it all depends on A) Everyone going out and buying a touch screen (not going to happen!) and B) People coding API’s for their touch screens and C) Windows not being over-zealous like they were with Vista and its driver certification -  otherwise they’ll have the OS, the Apps, but all the hardware makers of touch-screen interfaces (Zalman etc) wont have their drivers “digitally signed” or whatever nonsensical term Microsoft are using nowadays.

Good luck, but much like SSD i think we’re a long way off yet.

Tags: jeff han, multi-touch, Windows, windows 7

Hyper-V Fun…

Or not. Managed to procure Windows Server 2008 w/ Hyper-V and a 120-day evaluation license yesterday. I promptly installed it on a Proliant DL380, went to install Hyper-V at which point it stated you must have Intel-VT enabled on this machine in order for Hyper-V to run. After much tabbing through pages of BIOS, i decided to give up on that server and use one of the other hundred available!

On the second machine, we enabled VT, installed Win Server 08, and then went to “add component > Hyper-V”, which also installed without error. On reboot of the server, it informed us that Hyper-V Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), aka The Important Bit, had failed to initialise, meaning we couldnt add any new VM’s, which is brilliant. When we tried to manually start the process, we recieved “Parameter Incorrect: Error 87″.

According to a colleague who has been on a Windows Server 2008 training course, this is caused by, nonsensically, the language being set to “non US”, i.e. not EN-US, during installation. I dont know WHY this should affect anything but apparently it does – i should have learned a long time ago that Microsoft and Logic dont go hand in hand. C’est la vie.

Tags: HV, Hyper V, Server 2008, VMM