Red Hat used to release its kernel SRPM package including a tarball of the vanilla kernel sources and a set of custom patches. This made it possible to rebuild the kernel with or without patches or with a custom selection of patches. It seems that things have changed and Red Hat now releases the Red…
During the last six months, running a CentOS server as a guest in Virtualbox or VMware has been as common for me as running a web browser. This is because I’ve constantly been trying to streamline the server configuration and utilize new technologies or techniques attempting to get better performance or just make it easier…
It seems that there is a problem compiling the Linux version of Truecrypt v4.2a on the 2.6.18 series of kernels. A patch has been posted in the Truecrypt forums (you need to be logged-in to read), but, although this patch resolves the compilation error, there have been reports that the program has problems unmounting the…
I use an old bt878-based TV capture card, whose remote control needs the lirc_gpio driver in order to work. I remember that this specific LIRC driver could not be compiled after upgrading to kernel 2.6.17. I investigated this problem a couple of days ago and it seems that the cause of this issue is the…
I was wondering how it would be possible to build a native kernel module, which is not enabled in the kernel configuration, and use it in order to add support for a certain feature to the system. This idea came to me while I was examining the kernel-module-ntfs SRPM package from the Livna repository. This…
This BASH script automates the procedure of getting the Fedora kernel headers, that was discussed in my previous post about preparing the complete kernel headers. It’s at a very early stage, does not include many checks, but does the job well, if configured properly. The configuration options are inside the script and they are mainly…
The official fedora kernel-devel package does not include the complete kernel headers. This should not be a problem in most cases when compiling third party modules, but there are times that one or more of these missing headers are absolutely needed. This document outlines a method to obtain the complete kernel headers for your currently…
This post is about a Creative PC-CAM 750, but it will do for all the Creative PC-CAM series web cameras. I had it somewhere in a closet for a long time and finally decided to try it in fedora. As it usually happens with webcams under linux, it did not work out-of-the-box as there was…
Yesterday I was messing around with UDEV. I own some usb storage devices which are not plugged into my main computer all the time, but only when I need them. In a such situation, the order you plug in the devices has an effect on the way their nodes are created in /dev. For example,…