Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

Fedora 16 failing to boot on an Intel D975XBX2 motherboard

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

I recently upgraded to Fedora 16 on my desktop PC, and had the unpleasant experience – which I can’t remember having for many years on Linux – that after a successful installation, it simply failed to boot. I was pretty surprised, but the Fedora common bugs page has an entry “Some systems…cannot boot GPT labelled disks“. Although it doesn’t mention Intel motherboards, this does seem to apply to mine, since the workaround described – marking the protective MBR entry as active – did work, and allowed the system to boot.

Anyway, maybe someone else will find this useful. There is a D975XBX2 BIOS update available (my machine was using revision 2770, some revisions back from the latet) so I guess I’ll try that sometime and see if it fixes the problem, although there is nothing obvious in the BIOS release changelog about it.

Adding some RHEL6 desktop tools to EPEL

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

Since I’m currently using RHEL6 on one machine as a desktop OS, I’ve been missing a few tools, which I’m working through submitting to EPEL. I’ve already submitted nautilus-image-converter (to allow fast resizing of images via GNOME context menu) and unison227 (great file synchronisation tool – a bit like Drop Box but you can keep it on your own servers). Last week I pushed a couple more useful tools to the testing repository:

  • Rapid SVN – nice little GUI for SVN
  • rpl – quick-and-easy command line search-and-replace