One of the things I really like about Linux is the availability of source code for the kernel and userland applications. If I encounter an issue where a program is misbehaving for some given reason, I can grab a source RPM from a network repository and start poking around to see what is going on. [...]
As you may surmise from several of my recent posts, I have been doing a ton of Linux virtualization (Xen, KVM, openvz) testing. In the case of KVM, numerous bug fixes are integrated into each kernel release, so it’s often beneficial to stick to the bleeding edge kernels (though great for testing, I wouldn’t feel [...]
I had to install some software last night on one of my 64-bit CentOS Linux hosts, and noticed that glibc was listed twice in my rpm query: $ rpm -q -a | grep glibc-2.5-34 glibc-2.5-34 glibc-2.5-34 At first I thought my RPM package database was borked, but then it dawned on me that there are [...]
I’ve written about yum in the past, and how it can be used to manage packages on CentOS Linux hosts. In addition to the base functionality that is available in yum, there are also numerous plugins that can be added to extend the base yum feature set. The full list of plugins can be viewed [...]
One really cool feature of ubuntu is the command-not-found script. If you try to execute a program, say, nmap — and that dpkg hasn’t been installed, the command-not-found script executes to parse a locally installed database to suggest, “hey, you should try executing # apt-get install nmap” or something similar. This really makes ubuntu more [...]
I recently encountered a bug in one of the Linux utilities I was using, and upgrading to the latest version of the utility appeared to fix the issue. Being the curious guy I am, I started poking around the web and various release notes to see when the issue was fixed. While digging through this [...]
