Yesterday’s night I installed a test machine to play with KVM and some other stuff, obviously the OS of choice is the trusty CentOS. I did a pretty minimal net-install but decided to install gnome desktop environment anyway because why not, not that it will be of much use, but still. Anyway, since the machine is an headless server it’s mandatory to be able to control it remotely, like the past 2 or 3 times, I installed XRDP expecting everything will be fine and working without any problem. …

Every time a new Kernel goes out there seems to be a new issue with VMware Workstation 9. Today I updated a couple of Fedora 18 boxes, applied the usual workaround (I wrote a post about it one month ago or so) which consists in ONE OF the following steps: ln -s /usr/src/kernels/_kernel_version_/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /usr/src/kernels/_kernel_version_/include/linux/version.h ### OR cp /usr/src/kernels/_kernel_version_/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /lib/modules/_kernel_version_/build/include/linux/ Rebooted and then issued the usual command (vmware-modconfig –console –install-all) to rebuild the needed VMware modules just to find out that it isn’t possible to rebuild the VMCI module. …

At a first glance enabling TRIM on a luks encrypted volume looks quite easy, and, as a matter of a fact it is. The shitstorm starts when trying to enable TRIM on the root volume, but, let’s go one step at a time. First of all, enabling trim on a regular not encrypted volume is pretty easy; just open the file <em>/etc/fstab</em> and add the flag <em>discard</em>. You may also want to add the flag <em>noatime</em> to prevent the OS from writing additional informations regarding last access date and such, it’s not strictly necessary but it will save the SSD’s cells some useless write operations. …

Thunar 1.6.2 (the default XFCE file manager) doesn’t seems to provide any kind of built in search function by default. A good way to address this issue is use catfish (which is installed by default in Fedora 18), just open Thunar, go to Edit and then Custom Actions and add the following line: catfish –fileman=thunar –hidden –path=%f

With Samba being the clusterfuck it is, every time a new version is released you have to expect something to be messed up. This time they added a bunch of new features like MS Active Directory support, too bad that now the simple directory sharing is broken/not working like it did before. Something like 1 year ago I wrote a small guide about how to setup a Samba share on Centos 6 and I used the same smb. …

During the installation process of VMware Workstation 9 some modules need to be compiled but unfortunately Workstation 9.0.1 doesn’t seems to be able to find by itself the correct kernel headers directory. If kernel headers aren’t already installed, open the terminal and type as root: yum install kernel-*. Wait for the process to be completed and then: sudo cp /usr/src/kernels/kernel_version.fc18.x86_64/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /lib/modules/kernel_version.fc18.x86_64/build/include/linux/. This should do the trick.

The first time I open Thunar (the default XFCE file manager) in fedora 17 it takes up to 30 seconds to show up. This is most likely due to Thunar trying – without being able – to mount a remote network folder, to solve the issue just open <em>/usr/share/gvfs/mounts/network.mount</em> and set <em>AutoMount=false</em>.

First of all, forget everything about the myth: Loonix, it just werks. Close to nothing werks out of the box, tho with a good amount of patience and a bit of tinkering there are good chances to make the whole thing working in a decent manner. First of all, the box I’ve here is a Thinkpad Edge 320 – 12983RG and I’ve installed Fedora 17 x64 with XFCE as DE. …