The Open Source Journal

RedHat's enterprise operating system doesn't provide support for XFS out of the box, due to support limitations. XFS is a mature and stable file system however, and has benefits in a number of areas, including file streaming, snapshotting, growing, and online defragmentation. In this brief article, I'll walk you through the process of adding XFS support to your RHEL5 (or CentOS) boxes.

XFS comes in two parts: userland tools (xfsprogs) for creating/checking/etc XFS partitions and xfs-kmod, the kernel module required to support XFS.

Yesterday, my Intel BOXD945GCLF Atom mini-itx motherboard arrived. This silent, low power motherboard combo is perfect for a variety of applications, ranging from network firewalls to car PCs. There is a lot of excitement surrounding this motherboard and the future of small form factor computing in general. Since I wish to exploit this in a variety of areas, I turned to FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. Read more to find out more information about the new Intel Atom processor, the D945GCLF motherboard that it comes with, and it's initial reaction to FreeBSD.

I'm a long time Linux user, but a much longer Windows user. While I've used a Mac before, I've never used as my primary desktop. Yesterday, my Mac Pro arrived, and I've been getting used to the 'Apple way' of doing things. Read more to see some of my notes and road bumps as I discover more about Apple's UNIX certified operating system on Day 1!

A useful utility called Ext2 IFS allows you to mount ext2 and ext3 filesystems from inside Microsoft Windows. It allows you to mount your Linux partitions as drive letters in Windows Explorer, giving you full (journaled!) read/write support. If you dual boot Windows and Linux or work in a mixed Windows/Linux environment, Ext2 IFS can be a godsend.

RedHat is one of the most widely used Linux distribution, at least in the corporate and academic sectors. It's been around for years and after all the shit they've gotten from users trapped in RPM "dependency hell," you'd think they'd have learned SOMETHING by now, right?...Right?

Most Internet users have probably used the file transfer protocol, or FTP, at one time or another whether or not they realize it. Largely transparent in this day and age to most web surfers, it was at one time the de facto standard for moving files across early networks (and eventually, the Internet). But has FTP run it's course? This system administrator thinks so. Read on for a brief history of FTP and why it just needs to fscking die already.

Quite some time ago I installed Gentoo on my workstation for dual booting. As part of this process, I replaced the MBR installed by Windows Vista with GRUB. After getting another workstation for Gentoo, I decided to delete the dual-booting Linux partitions and recover the space for Vista to use. Sadly, I didn't stop to think before deleting my GRUB (/boot) partition and resizing my NTFS partition - rendering my system completely unbootable. I had to make the system bootable without rebooting, but how...?

When I first entered the Linux world a decade ago, my desktop experience was pretty was pretty abysmal: just xterms started by running the 'startx' command. It wasn't until much later, late 2000, that I started using KDE. I was in love.

Quite often you run into new problems that don't have an immediate and clear solution. Generally these errors appear as cryptic lines in dmesg, who's subsequent googling reveals little to no detail of the true issue. This time, it was some lines concerning my hard drives (which always raise concern). It can be frustrating solving problems that seemingly no one else has encountered, but it's part of every IT person's job. Perhaps I should make this a weekly column...

Early adopters of Gentoo will remember Daniel Robbins, or drobbins as he was more commonly known, the creator of Gentoo Linux, for his excellently written documentation on IBM developerWorks, commitment to Gentoo, activity in the community, and eventual high profile departure from Gentoo. But did you know he's still contributing to Gentoo in different ways?