According to Groklaw, the long running battle between SCO and Novell may finally be over. The Judge ruled that SCO, the company that claimed Linux infringed on it’s IP and sued everybody in sight, never did own any rights to Unix in the first place, and has ordered the company to pay millions. Novell and others are unlikely to ever see much of that, though, as SCO is in bankruptcy.

1. Yum up some packages:

   yum install php-pear php-devel httpd-devel

2. Install APC using pear (the pear installer is smarter than the pecl installer):
   When the installer asks about APXS, say ‘no’. 

   pear install pecl/apc

3. Tell PHP to load APC:

   echo extension=apc.so > /etc/php.d/apc.ini

4. Restart Apache:

   /sbin/service httpd graceful

Stuck with PHP 5.1.6 on RHEL or even CentOS (and a sysadmin who insists on using packages)? Need JSON? I did. The solution is easy:

yum install php-devel
pecl install json

The pecl install failed when it hit an 8MB memory limit, and I was clueless about how to fix it until I learned that the pecl installer ignores the php.ini. Turns out the best solution is to use the pear installer (which does follow php.ini settings):

pear install pecl/json

how to install and configure MySQL database server

yum, mysql, linux, yellow dog updater modified

At work I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but my personal stuff is served from machines running CentOS. Both distros were just bumped to version 5, bringing with them support for current components of the LAMP stack.

I care because I want Apache 2.2.4, and while it’s pretty easy to get MySQL & PHP 5 on a CentOS/Plesk box, Apache 2.2 is a bit more of a struggle.

Gary Sims at Linux.com calls the new CentOS release “a solid enterprise OS,” and points out that it includes support for virtualization, GFS2 and other clustering technologies.

Upgrading looks easy — if you’ve got physical access to the machine — but the release docs include some alternative instructions for the daring:

The best way to move from CentOS-4 to CentOS-5 is via an installer upgrade. However if you must do it online, here are some tips to help:

1. Remove as many packages as you can, strip it right back to the original OS if possible
2. Backup everything
3. Disable all repositories, except the centos-5 OS and Updates repos
4. init 3
5. shutdown as many services as possible
6. download and install the centos-release-5.x rpm, which will update your yum configs
7. run a yum upgade ( not update )

Now the question is when will I try it…

Centos, apache 2.2, linux, centos 5, release

The real map of the world’s top 100 supercomputers isn’t nearly as US-centric as my screenshot suggests, but the operating system stats are seriously tilted toward Linux. Over 400 of the top 500 supercomputers in the November 2006 report run some form of the free operating system. Generic “Linux” leads the pack, but Redhat and SuSE are the two most named distributions. Non-free operating systems include IBM’s AIX, HP-UX, and MacOS X.

The best part of the whole site, however, is in the footer, where a random quote appears with each page load. The best of them come from Seymour Cray, who it turns out was much more colorful than I realized. Example: speaking on RAM and virtual memory:

Memory is like an orgasm. It’s a lot better if you don’t have to fake it.

Go Seymour.

linux, operating systems, seymour cray, stats, supercomputers, supercomputing, top 500

Holy smokes. As Dell’s sales slump and stock remains flat, the famously unimaginative company is trying to tap into the Mob for ideas about what new shade of grey to deliver its hardware in next. And what did the Dell IdeaStorm mob say?

“Give us Linux!”

“Give Us OpenOffice.”

And how did Dell respond?

“No. No. And, No.”

John Naughton reports on the story for The Guardian, explaining:

more than 85,000 people took the trouble to register with IdeaStorm in order to tell Mr Dell that they wanted him to ship his computers with Linux pre-installed. Moreover, 55,000 revealed that they would like the free open-source office software suite, OpenOffice, pre-installed on their shiny new Dell machines.

And all Michael Dell could say was that there are too many variants of Linux. Of course that doesn’t explain why the company, who’s biggest contribution to the technology world was an online store that allowed customers to chose computer configurations from a dizzying array of options, doesn’t simply allow customers to buy their PCs with no software at all.

users, mob, linux, IdeaStorm, Michael Dell, OpenOffice, Dell IdeaStorm, Dell

I got tipped to this geeky-funny comic that deserves reposting here for casual friday:

sysop, humor, linux, sudo, make me a sandwich, sandwich, cartoon

How to Install iPod Linux on 1 & 2G mini, 4G, Photo

ipod, linux, tutorial

The MAKE: podcast pointed me to gumstix — really small computers built for hacking. Cool.

tags: gumstix, hacking, hardware hacking, linux, linux computer, make magazine, make podcast, tiny, tiny computer, tiny linux

Be geeky and look at the Apache modules:

/usr/sbin/httpd -l
Compiled in modules:
core.c
prefork.c
http_core.c
mod_so.c

Set your path:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin
export PATH