Linux Usage for 2015

Calendar year 2015 is coming to an end, and I know I haven't been posting much here lately. But here's my Linux usage for 2015.

Desktop Computer

For year 2015, I noticed that I've used Red Hat family distributions starting Feb 2015.

Distribution	Used from	Used until
CentOS 7 (Gnome)	2015-06-15	2015-12-31
Fedora 22 Workstation (Gnome)	2015-06-04	2015-06-14
Fedora 22 Workstation (KDE)	2015-05-30	2015-06-04
Fedora 21 Workstation (Gnome)	2015-02-06	2015-05-30
Antergos (Gnome)	2014-08-23	2015-02-05

Laptop Computer

My laptop, an aging IBM ThinkPad T60, is what I normally use to try different distributions. So there is a lot of variations in usage in this computer.

Distribution	Used from	Used until
Q4OS 1.2 Orion	2015-08-08	2015-12-31
Manjaro i3 0.8.13.1	2015-08-06	2015-08-07
Debian 8.1	2015-08-03	2015-08-06
Peppermint 6	2015-07-10	2015-08-02
Bodhi Linux 3.0	2015-07-06	2015-07-09
CentOS 7	2015-05-14	2015-07-05
elementary OS 0.3 Freya	2015-05-10	2015-05-13
CentOS 7	2015-03-22	2015-05-10
Fedora 21 Workstation	2015-02-02	2015-03-22
Ubuntu MATE 14.04.1	2015-01-29	2015-02-02
PC-BSD 10.1	2015-01-28	2015-01-29
Ubuntu MATE 14.04	2014-11-11	2015-01-28

For year 2016, I'm planning to try out Linux distributions that make it easy for me to (1) install proprietary video drivers and (2) the Steam client because I've decided I want to try and play some video games again.

My current pick as of this posting is the Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa MATE edition. As a matter of fact, it's currently an ongoing installation to my desktop PC right now.

Here's to the new year for computing, especially Linux. Happy Linuxing!

A Basic CentOS LAMP Server Build in VirtualBox

I've been using Fedora for more than a month now and I wanted to create a virtual machine (VM) in VirtualBox which I can use for learning web development. I usually go for a Debian based VM but this time, since I'm on Fedora, then I decided to go with CentOS.

I have used CentOS before so I knew that it took a bit of effort to get it up and running. In this post, I put down my notes into how I built a CentOS VM for a basic LAMP server.

Creating the CentOS guest

The CentOS OS is easy enough to install. Just download the ISO image from their site; I chose to use the CentOS-6.5-x86_64-minimal.iso image. It's just a matter of using the downloaded image as the DVD media for the VM. Installation is straightforward and fast and finishes in under 30 minutes.

NOTE: In my setup, I have set 2 network interfaces -- one for Host-only adapter and another for NAT adapter. At this time of posting, I suggest to set Host-only as adapter 1 and NAT as adapter 2 because I've run into some issues with the network interfaces. Host-only interface is for accessing the VM from the host machine while the NAT interface takes care of the connection to the Internets.

Enable networking in the CentOS guest

Network interfaces are down by default in CentOS ^[1]. So there is a need to do some manual configuration. To show the interfaces, use command ip addr show. Since my setup has 2 network adapters set in VirtualBox, the result of that command shows eth0 and eth2, for the Host-only adapter and the NAT adapter, respectively. The configuration files for these are located in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX where X is the interface number.

Setting up a wireless nework connection via command line

Update: These commands only works for unsecured SSIDs, apparently (and obviously).

Having set up a working wireless connection to the network, it was time to get it connected. I decided to use the command line way to connect to the network.

[usr@host ~]$ su -
Password:
[usr@host ~]# ifconfig <interface> down
[usr@host ~]# dhclient -r <interface>
[usr@host ~]# ifconfig <interface> up
[usr@host ~]# iwconfig <interface> essid "<essid_in_quotes>"
[usr@host ~]# iwconfig <interface> mode Managed
[usr@host ~]# dhclient <interface>

Getting the DWA-125 Wireless Dongle to Work in CentOS 5.8

I use an old IBM Thinkpad X32 which doesn't come with a built-in wireless networking card. Fortunately, I still have my D-Link DWA-125 wireless USB adapter lying around. I used this on a previous computer before and it didn't let me down. I was hoping that this time around, it wouldn't let me down either; and I can say that it didn't as I am typing this post using the successful setup of a wireless connection. This time around, I am using CentOS 5.8 as my operating system. Here's how I got it working.