Blog entries from Abelardo Ricart

Sony's Crippled Intel VT Support

Abelardo Ricart — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:18:08 +0100

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 beRead More...

DoD CAC Cards and Gentoo Linux

Abelardo Ricart — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

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.

Software Installation

Alright, this is fairly simple. Here's what youRead More...

Recent Pidgin and Yahoo! Connectivity Issues

Abelardo Ricart — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

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:

cs102.msg.mud.yahoo.com

I hope this issue gets resolved permenently for Pidgin. Although I kRead More...

Best Gaming Platform Emulation Lineup

Abelardo Ricart — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

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!

Intro to Gaming Platform Emulation

When I talk about gaming platform emulation here, I'm talking about running games on your Linux machine using software that simulates the environment the games would otherwise run in natively. The type of emuRead More...

ATI Catalyst (fglrx) and Kernels 2.6.30 / 2.6.29

Abelardo Ricart — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

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. Read More...

Slow Resize (And Minimize/Restore) with Compiz and Catalyst (fglrx)

Abelardo Ricart — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

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?

Digging Deeper

After a night of mostly unsuccesfRead More...