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 running kernel in Fedora Core by using the kernel SRPM package without compiling the kernel.

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, [...]