What a year!!

~ Matt Smith ~ Leave a comment

Two years at Red Hat have flown by at such a rapid pace; I’m even a couple months late in blogging about it! To top off another year full of great projects, awesome technology, and incredible people, I’ve had a couple exciting things happen that I wanted to share.

Last month I was chosen to be a “Red Hat Chairman’s Award” recipient, and last week (photo below) I was awarded “North American Account Solutions Architect” of the Year!

image

I am truly humbled by both of these awards, and was speechless when I heard my name called (those who know me well understand how rare that is). I am looking forward to see what this next year will bring!

Red Hat Satellite Blog – Red Hat Customer Portal

~ Matt Smith ~ Leave a comment

With the ever changing landscape in IT, many enterprise environments are looking for ways to reduce or eliminate downtime, improve security, reduce footprint, and achieve application portability. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host provides a way to achieve these goals. In this blog we cover the steps needed to setup Satellite 6 to deploy RHEL Atomic Hosts within your environment.

https://access.redhat.com/blogs/1169563/

An Introduction to Interoperability Challenges in the Modern Enterprise

~ Matt Smith ~ Leave a comment

The act of hooking-up a dishwasher is not unlike adding a Linux system to an existing enterprise IT environment. When you deploy a Linux system, it too needs to be “hooked-up”. As the data that flows through your environment consists of different kinds of objects (e.g. users, groups, hosts, and services) the associated identity information is not unlike the water in your dishwasher. Without this identity information(or, in the case of the dishwasher, without the water) your new machine is less than useful. Ensuring that your new system (or new dishwasher) is properly connected is important, if not essential.

Read more at the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Blog.

Chrome as your desktop environment

~ Matt Smith ~ Leave a comment

I have an old Asus 1000HE Eee PC (32-bit, 2GB RAM, 128GB SSD).  Fedora 21 with Gnome Shell runs ok, but as I only use this netbook to browse the web, I figured I’d try to figure out how to launch Chrome as the desktop environment, cutting Gnome Shell out completely.  In the process of trying to determine which lightweight window manager I would use, I discovered that Google Chrome (my browser of choice) includes it’s own called Ash.  So, setting this up was as easy as creating a single file, and simply selecting “Chrome” as my login session from GDM.

/etc/X11/sessions/chrome.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Chrome
Comment=Chrome Browser
Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome --open-ash --ash-force-desktop --ash-host-window-bounds="1024x600"
TryExec=/usr/bin/google-chrome
Icon=
Type=Application
DesktopNames=Chrome

This isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s pretty neat.  A few problems:

  • Triggering a download crashes the browser, as Chrome can’t launch the Gnome (GTK?) download widget
  • No battery,audio, or wifi system icons
  • Initially, the desktop was off-center.  Apparently, the netbook screen size (1024×600) was odd, so it needed to be explicitly specified with the “-bounds” parameter.

Next, I’m going to give Android-x86 a shot on this Eee PC.

EL7 on old Acer Aspire 5520 Laptop

~ Matt Smith ~ Leave a comment

Reminder to self: When installing EL7 (RHEL7/CentOS7) on a old Acer Aspire 5520 laptop, fetch and install the following RPMs from elrepo.org:

  • kmod-ath5k
  • kmod-nvidia-304xx-304
  • nvidia-x11-drv-304xx-304
  • kmod-forcedeth

Output of lspci (to add searchable keywords to this post):

00:00.0 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 Memory Controller (rev a2)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 ISA Bridge (rev a2)
00:01.1 SMBus: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 SMBus (rev a2)
00:01.2 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 Memory Controller (rev a2)
00:01.3 Co-processor: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 Co-processor (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a2)
00:02.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev a2)
00:04.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a2)
00:04.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev a2)
00:06.0 IDE interface: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 IDE Controller (rev a1)
00:07.0 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 High Definition Audio (rev a1)
00:08.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 PCI Bridge (rev a2)
00:09.0 IDE interface: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 AHCI Controller (rev a2)
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 Ethernet (rev a2)
00:0c.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 PCI Express Bridge (rev a2)
00:0d.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP67 PCI Express Bridge (rev a2)
00:12.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation C67 [GeForce 7000M / nForce 610M] (rev a2)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:04.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05)
01:04.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22)
01:04.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 12)
01:04.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 12)
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR242x / AR542x Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

Closing thought: EL7 runs really well on this ancient laptop!