Noa's blog » centos http://noa.resare.com moderately interesting words about things going through my mind Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:56:06 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 D-Link DWL-G510 in CentOS 5 http://noa.resare.com/2009/12/dwl-g510-centos/ http://noa.resare.com/2009/12/dwl-g510-centos/#comments Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:48:11 +0000 noa http://noa.resare.com/?p=281 Some days ago I spent some time getting a PCI WiFi 802.11G network card to work in CentOS 5.4. My card identifies itself as a "D-Link System Inc AirPlus G DWL-G510" (PCI id 1186:3c09) and uses the "RaLink RT2561/RT61 rev B 802.11g" chipset (PCI id 1814:0302)DWL-G510

A driver for this card is included in the standard CentOS 5 kernel (tested with kernel-2.6.18-164.9.1.el5) under the name rt61pci, however to be able to function a binary firmware is needed. Some searching revealed that the firmware is available in Fedora's rt61pci-firmware package. I rebuilt the package and put it in my CentOS playground repository.

So, if you have such a card and want to make it work in CentOS5 you might want to try running rpm -ivh http://rpm.resare.com/centos5-playground/i386/rt61pci-firmware-1.2-6.el5.noarch.rpm as root. Once that is done, running modprobe rt61pci should do the trick.

]]> http://noa.resare.com/2009/12/dwl-g510-centos/feed/ 1 CentOS prerelease security http://noa.resare.com/2009/09/pre-security/ http://noa.resare.com/2009/09/pre-security/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:19:11 +0000 noa http://noa.resare.com/?p=230 The CentOS Linux distribution is in many respects the optimal choice for anyone that wants a stable system that is supported over a number of years. I run it on a handful of servers and the problems are few and far between.centoslogo-200

However, one thing has been emerging as a bit of a problem lately, and that is that security updates from Red Hat has taken quite some time to get built and released for CentOS. This is especially true in the weeks following a new point release from Red Hat. Not having security updates available for known problems for weeks a the time makes users of CentOS less secure than they would otherwise be.

To help make this problem a bit less pronounced I have started to rebuild security updates from Red Hat and installing them on the systems I administer. That's one of the beauties of open source, you can fix things. If anyone else is interested in those updated packages they can be found at http://rpm.resare.com/centos5-pre-security. If you're in the target demographic you'll know what to do.

]]> http://noa.resare.com/2009/09/pre-security/feed/ 0 CentOS, here I come! http://noa.resare.com/2008/07/centos-here-i-come/ http://noa.resare.com/2008/07/centos-here-i-come/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:11:05 +0000 noa http://noa.resare.com/?p=13 With the release of CentOS 5.2 a while ago I decided that it was finally time to make the switch from Fedora on my primary work computer to something else. I have felt for a while now that the fast pace of Fedora, and it's sometimes pretty serious regressions have made it increasingly a bad fit to my operating system needs. I spend my working days doing software development in Java, and I need an operating system that I can be productive in, and yet a system that is stable enough and with enough long term planning and testing to not get in the way of my work.

So, I have made the switch and so far I'm happy with it. I'll be back with some followup posts with info about adaptations and fixes for my new environment.

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