Posted by: Abelardo Ricart
on July 23 2009
A funny thing happened when I recently attempted to create a KVM virtual machine on my Sony Vaio laptop. Upon loading the kvm-intel.ko kernel module, I receive a rather peculiar error message:
kvm: disabled by BIOS
Disabled by BIOS? Although the error really didn't say much, I could only assume that somehow the BIOS provided by Sony for my laptop disabled Intel VT by default. A bit of googling turned up this article, as well as this KB article from Sony, showing my assumption to be correct.
Posted by: Abelardo Ricart
on June 24 2009
Because the only guide on setting up DoD CAC cards on Gentoo was lost after the Gentoo Wiki went out of commission (they are back now, less a bunch of articles), I decided to write a guide on how to get a good DoD CAC setup on your Gentoo system.
If you don't know what a CAC card is, Wikipedia has a good article on them here. It's basically an identification card for U.S. Department of Defense employees.
Posted by: Abelardo Ricart
on June 20 2009
These past few days I've had issues connecting to Yahoo! Messenger with Pidgin. Getting a bit fed-up, I decided to check the Pidgin bug tracker to see if there was solution in the works.
Indeed, the answer to my connection issue was pretty simple. As referenced in ticket #8853, chaging the Paging Server for Yahoo! under the advanced account options worked for me. I changed it to this:
Posted by: Abelardo Ricart
on June 17 2009
Whoever says Linux isn't a good platform for gaming is only half right (for now). While Linux may not have a very robust lineup of games that run natively, there are still options out there for creating a great gaming experience!
Posted by: Abelardo Ricart
on June 17 2009
Updates / Changes
- 29 July 2009 - Gentoo now has Catalyst 9.7 drivers in the official tree. Should work with kernels 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 as well. A leaked beta ATI driver has given us hope that the next version of fglrx will finally support these kernels without patching.
- 26 July 2009 - Well, I just realized that Catalyst 9.7 drivers have been released. I've seen conflicting reports as to whether Gentoo's patches for 9.6 can be used with 9.7. If they don't work, then try this.
- 27 June 2009 - As of yesterday, the patches discussed below are in the official portage tree! Hooray Gentoo!!!
Introduction
Posted by: Abelardo Ricart
on June 17 2009
Introduction
I recently came acrossed a fairly annoying issue while using the ATI Catalyst driver with Compiz-Fusion desktop effects enabled. Whenever I performed an action on a window that required the window to be redrawn, there was quite a noticeable delay while the action was being performed. Sometimes I even had to wait up to 8 seconds for the action (resize/minimize/restore) to be performed! So what exactly was going on?
Linux Community 
