Verizon pc770 wireless card setup on CentOS 6.x

It's a very good time in a Linux lovers life when you can just say, "it works"... Because of all of the hard work of countless volunteers (and/or paid professionals). I am pleased to announce that the crappy unount of the virtual CD ROM is no longer needed in CentOS 6.x (or SL 6, RedHat 6)!

Thank You!

1. Plug in the card
2. Select the provider
3. Follow the prompts
4. Activate the card

NICE. It just WORKS!

P.S. Sorry about the situation for CentOS 5.x, but it's, "doable".

CentOS 6.x VMware Workstation 7.1 installation issue solved.

As this writing, VMware-Workstation 7.1 has issues building vmmon on CentOS 6.2 and therefore SL 6 and RHEL 6 also. After some head scratching, google'n and lots of reading, here is the easy way to get up and running.

This install example is for VMware-Workstation-7.1.5-491717.i386.bundle at the very least. Download that from VMware as you would normally.

First, make sure you have booted to the most recent kernel before installing. Otherwise you will not be able to build the VMware modules against the kernel you are running.

First, make sure to have some basic prerequisites before you start:

yum install gcc gcc-c++ kernel-headers kernel-devel

Next install (or update) the VMware-Workstation bundle as root and valid $DISPLAY set:

bash VMware-Workstation-7.1.5-491717.i386.bundle

Follow the promps as usual.

Bummer, vmmon won't load and produces errors in /var/log/messages like:
kernel: vmmon: disagrees about version of symbol smp_ops
kernel: vmmon: Unknown symbol smp_ops

First attempt at a work around yields the ever helpful Akemi Yag (aka "toracat")  blog and the perfect *helpful* comment by NomadAU. Why is that Redhat Bugzilla entry closed anyway??


Here is the portion that is key to fixing the issue; as root:

mv /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary/bld-2.6.32-*-rhel6 ~/

Finally run:

vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

How to get system-config-netboot working on CentOS 6, RHEL 6 or SL 6

Sadly, Redhat has decided to drop system-config-netboot from it's offerings for RHEL 6. I was very much accustomed to the simplicity of using system-config-netboot for PXE boot client installs. Redhat may have not included the packages to install system-config-netboot, but it is certainly easy to get running on your RHEL 6 or clone. Here is the CentOS 6 i386example (please run commands as root or sudo you guts out):

1. Make sure some pre-requisites are in place:

yum install tftp-server xinetd pygtk2-libglade gnome-python2-canvas

2. Adjust for your arch type: Download the latest CentOS 5.x system-config-netboot* and alchemist* versions:

wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/system-config-netboot-0.1.45.1-3.el5.noarch.rpm
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/system-config-netboot-cmd-0.1.45.1-3.el5.noarch.rpm
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5/os/i386/CentOS/alchemist-1.0.36-2.el5.i386.rpm

3. Force the install of the above packages:

rpm -ihv --force --nodeps system-config-netboot-* alchemist-1.0.36-2.el5.i386.rpm

4. Move part of the installed alchemist package to the correct place... bad administrator! ;)

mv /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/* /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/

Running "system-config-netboot" through some warning message at me, but it did what I wanted it to do

Yeah, it's a bit hackish. I'm OK with it if you are. You *could* rebuild the source rpm for each of them correcting the the alchemist path etc. I will for my systems, but this is the "easy" version of the "How to get system-config-netboot working on CentOS 6, RHEL 6 or SL 6" after all...