Linux

Debian 13 is out and I did what any sensible person does: installed it on a spare machine, then immediately tried to make it do something it doesn’t want to do. Here’s the problem in two lines. Debian 13 ships Python 3.13 and NVIDIA driver 550, which tops out at CUDA 12.4. ComfyUI wants PyTorch 2.9+, compiled against CUDA 12.8, which wants driver 570+. That’s a gap. And on Debian, the official NVIDIA CUDA repo doesn’t support 13 yet anyway. You could hunt down a third-party driver package. You could also jam a fork into a toaster. Both will end badly. ...

Having recently move to Jekyll as my blogging platform, I thought I would take a quick look at how easy it is to get going on Linux. Installation on CentOS 7 is very straight forward. First add the EPEL repository for CentOS 7 as this is where you will find the nodejs rpm sudo yum install http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/beta/7/x86_64/epel-release-7-0.2.noarch.rpm Install the required packages, note npm is not required but handy to have around. sudo yum install nodejs npm ruby ruby-devel rubygems git gem install jekyll Start using Jekyll. ...

HHVM is a virtual machine for Hack and PHP it uses JIT to improve performance. Installation on a less than bleeding edge OS can prove a little challenging. What follows is what I did to get it up and going quickly for our developers in our CentOS 6.5 environment. It may work for you too. Packages were sourced from two repo’s http://yum.gleez.com/ and http://remi.conetix.com.au/ Things boiled down to these 11 packages that were signed and added to our local yum repo: ...

Oracle Linux 7 was released this last week 2nd of RHEL directives to make a GA release, CentOS being the first and Scientific Linux still to come, currently in alpha. No real surprises here, now comes with the UEK, 3.8.13-35.3.1.el7uek.x86_64, kernel as default. If you what to test it out and take it for a spin it’s pretty easy to using the my lunchbox set of packer templates files which have been updated to support OEL 7.0. ...

So part one finished up with a Virtualbox VM , two blank disk and the OEL CD image in the virtual CD drive. Fair warning I have taken some liberty with technical preciseness of handsfree, but it’s pretty close. If some knows how I can second commands to the guest from the host command line let me know, virt-install maybe. So this is straight forward and I have covered some of these techniques in other posts like Kickstart for Solaris Admins or my even older Grub menu reinstall. Startup the VB guest it should boot off your attached CD/DVD image. and the welcome screen press TAB key

Rather than wait until I have the whole thing polished I thought I’d do a multipart entry on building Oracle VM Manager VM and installing the software. Now the previous version 3.0.3 had a VirtualBox template available. The current version 3.1.1 doesn’t, at least not that I can find, so this is a kinda of roll your own template. Tools used for this job: Virtual Box 4.1.8 Oracle VM Manager ISO 3.1.1 OEL R6U1 ISO

Linux kickstart for Solaris Admin’sSo sometimes Solaris Admins need to turn their hand at another OS for various reasons, especial in this day and age of mass production of virtual environments. Solaris Admins will be well versed with jumpstart a tried and truly tested system of automated builds for over a decade now. While recently this system has been thrown out with the bath water for AI in Solaris 11 and while the jury is still out on that one that’s a conversation for another time. ...

So I have a couple of machine’s I’m reinstalling on a regular basis as part of some on going work. Unfortunately PXE booting is not an option for them so it been a process of attaching a virtual CDROM image and then typing in a bunch of kickstart parameters at the boot menu. Well had enough, time to be a better way. I’m aware of the “remote control” for anaconda so it was time to make it work for me.

Managing Linux in production environments.

A quick sidestep as I needed to get some files up to share with my sister in-law so I thought I’d enable dropbox on this new desktop. Documented here as there seems to be some disparate inaccurate bits of info