I usually write about Unreal Engine over on my other website, because it tackles more 3D related topics – but compiling the engine from source is a bit more “blood and gore” thing so I thought it best placed here with all the other Linux topics. Anyway… Today we’re installing Unreal Engine on a CentOS … Read more
On extremely rare occasions (LOL) we get precompiled binaires we can install on our Linux systems. Depending on the distributions, we may end up with an rpm file. I always forget how to install them when this happens – probably it happens so very rarely. Here’s how we can do that. Installing rpm files with … Read more
I’ve had a power cut recently, which seems to have corrupted the latest Kernel I have installed on my CentOS 6 server. I can boot into the previous one just fine, but of course if I forget to make a choice on startup, the server doesn’t start up. That’s annoying.
Thankfully there are ways to either fix the latest version, remove it, and even exclude a particular version from future updates. Here’s what worked for me on CentOS 6:
I’ve been trying to build Blender from source on CentOS for many years, but never had any luck making it work. There was always one package missing, or something else that needed to be configured. Depressed and resentful, I gave up and never got a chance to try Blender on CentOS.
Recently, the Blender Devs have started releasing a pre-compiled version of Blender for CentOS for download. This should work on RHEL and Fedora just as well. Huzzah!
With a fresh installation of CentOS looking at me from my old Samsung Q330 laptop, I thought I’d try it out. It works great! Here’s what I had to do to make it work, step by step.
Every so often, a yum update brings unexpected results with it, like services no longer working due to spurious error messages that don’t tell you what’s actually wrong. This only very rarely happens though, and we may need to revert to the state of our system before such an update took place. Thankfully, yum has … Read more
I always forget how to unTAR a .bz2 file – perhaps this little memory aid will help me remember for the future. tar -xjvf filename.bz2 This will do the trick 🙂 The key to the magic is to provide the j switch, which tells the TAR command to use bzip2 compression.
The Apache web server has a convenient feature called Name-based Virtual Hosting. This function allows us to have a single LAMP Stack server configured on one IP address, but serve a different set of files depending on which domain is being requested.
This sounds more complicated than it is. Say we had example1.com and example2.com, both of which are to be separate websites, but both domains point to the same IP address. Apache’s Name-based Virtual hosting makes this possible. In fact, this feature forms the basis of 90% of this planet’s shared hosting business.
Let’s see how to do this in CentOS 6 and 7.
By default, CentOS 7 comes with support for PHP 5.4. Sadly that version has reached the end of its life in 2015and is no longer updated by the developers. If we want to stay up to date with the latest software, we may want to upgrade (if our applications are working with newer versions of PHP).
For CentOS users this either means to compile cutting edge versions from source and tweaking lots of scary system configurations – or dipping into the power of Software Collections. These are official pre-compiled packages by the software vendor, designed to run newer versions of software alongside those that are provided by default.
At the time of writing, PHP 7.2 is available but it’s not part of the software collections yet, so we’ll use PHP 7.1 with FPM support under Apache (as it’s the recommended way to do so).
Let’s begin!
