RHEL 6.0 on the Desktop - thoughts and screenshots

Ever since trying the Alpha of Scientific Linux 6 I've been wanting to check out the finished upstream product. Good thing Red Hat offers 30 day evaluations and a few days ago, although confessing that I'm planning to stay with 5.x for a considerable time to come, registered to download an evaluation copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, the only one available for testing. However, you can turn this into anything you like.

I'm still running Slackware on my desktops, but truth be told Red Hat products, that includes Fedora for me, seem to work best on this laptop (although Arch does too, no complaints). Others did either not recognise the (wired) NIC, had problems setting up the sound card, or crashed unacceptably often.

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Quick Look at Scientific Linux 6.0 Alpha

I was meaning to write this yesterday and before you know, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 final is out. But that doesn't mean we can't post a quick look at this one.
As most of you will know, Scientific Linux is a free clone of RHEL compiled from the original source rpm's, and with the upstream branding removed. As such it is almost identical to the Red Hat product, but in contrast to the CentOS project the SL team are adding and tweaking a few packages to make it better suit their needs.
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How to add Broadcom 43xx wireless to Scientific Linux 5.5

This one is a bit more involved than getting Broadcom wireless support in Fedora 14, but not that hard either. It should also be valid for CentOS 5.

First of all, if you haven't already done so, ugrade to the latest kernel, at present 2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 .

First you will have to add the EPEL repository because when getting the relevant broadcom packages they rely on this to be enabled for dependency resolution.
EPEL provides add-on packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x and 4.x releases and compatible derivatives (and also for 6.x in view of the upcoming release). EPEL packages are in most cases built or derived from the equivalent ones in Fedora repository and maintained by the same people. You can read more about the whole project here to find out more about the quality of packages etc, or just skip ahead to add the repository.

Currently, what you want is this command:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm'

Enter it into a terminal and hit enter. Yes, epel-release-5-4 is correct, there is no 5.5 yet.

Then in Yum Extender or whatever your package manager of choice in Scientific Linux you should already have the Atrpms repository listed. Enable it and the EPEL one and refresh the package listing. Make sure you're looking at available packages through the filter, not updates or installed. Search for broadcom and the correct packages available for your architecture should show up.

Choose broadcom-wl and one of the available kernel modules and install, chances are you want the first  

broadcom-wl-kmdl-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 kernel modules for the Linux kernel package:

kernel-2.6.18-194.17.4.el5.x86_64.rpm

and not the centos.plus or xen ones.

Reboot, see your new interface detected, enter your credentials into the NetworkManager applet and be online wirelessly! The connection will probably be a bit slower than in Fedora 14.

I installed SL 5.5 a few weeks ago on this laptop to see how it would fare, but there seems to be no guide like this around, only half finished threads and recommendations to use ndiswrapper, which for some reason did not work for me. Setting this up in Fedora got me thinking and it wasn't more than a few minutes after that I had set it up in Scientific Linux as well.

Did others before figure this all out on their own? Going by some threads, not everybody did.

In SL/RHEL/CentOS 6 it shall be more straight forward, probably more like in recent Fedora releases (I hope).

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How to add Broadcom 43xx wireless to Fedora 14

This one is easy, I've never had to do so little fiddling and searching:

Go to http://rpmfusion.org/ and add both the free and the non-free repositories unless the latter one is against your philosophical stance.

You can do this via graphical setup, installing a small rpm file that will set this up for you, or at the command line where you can basically just copy the commands into your terminal (you have to become root for this).

Update your repositories and install all updates prior to proceeding.

Search for broadcom-wl, install the package and reboot.

Voila, there you are. Enter network credentials into NetworkManager or Wicd if you prefer that and you're online. It's never been easier.

And here you can find the respective page on the fedora community website, with links to more wireless solutions.

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Salix OS have released 13.1.2 KDE & KDE Live

On 30/10/2010 the Salix team announced the release of a KDE spin of their latest 13.1.2 offering. This is a boon for everybody whose favorite desktop environment is KDE 4, and from reading the announcement this a standard KDE SC with all the apps that normally gives you, so not much to say about that. It also includes Koffice and perhaps most interestingly has added the Kaffeine media player and the Clementine audio player, a successor to Amarok.
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