Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Official announcement : Red Hat Software Collections 1.0 Beta Now Available More information on Software Collections Software Collections Guide Stability addicts can keep quiet, PHP 5.3.3 is still the standard version provided with RHEL-6. We'll soon have an official and supported way to install PHP version 5.4 , beside the system version, without any effect on installed components. The announcement tells us the life cycle will be 3 years. Warning : it's a beta version, published for evaluation purposes. Installation...

OpenStack is picking up a lot of steam these days, but getting it installed can be a hassle. Lots of puppet -based installers have popped up to automate this arduous task. Using Foreman , however, administrators can not only configure and install OpenStack using puppet, but provision & add new compute nodes at their fancy. The Foreman is a Ruby on Rails application that does configuration management with puppet and provisioning. We'll use both of these features to make using...

This article will show you how to use two software collections of RHSCL 1.0 Beta for cutting edge development. We will create a Django 1.5 application (running on Python 3.3), that will use PostgreSQL 9.2 as a database. Installing Dependencies First off, we will install the required collections. If you haven't done so already, you need to subscribe to the correct RHN channel ( rhel-x86_64- variant -6-rhscl-1-beta , where variant is one of server , client or workstation ). Now...

You may have seen references to " software collections " in this blog, but this is different. "Red Hat Software Collections", now in beta for the first time, is a collection of refreshed and supported web/dynamic languages and databases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now you can have two versions of software on one OS, or refresh these languages and databases more frequently. See this list below! From the announcement: "Red Hat is pleased to announce the Beta release of...

A common performance related issue we are seeing is how certain instructions are causing bottlenecks. Sometimes it just doesn't make sense. Especially when it involves lots of threads or shared memory on NUMA systems. For quite awhile a bunch of us have been writing tools to help exploit features of the CPU to provide us insight to not only the instruction of the bottleneck but the data address too. See, the instruction is only half the picture. Having the data...

One common idiom in performance monitoring is how long did it take for a program to do something. For example you may want to know the time taken for database queries in PostgreSQL or just-in-time translations in a Java Virtual Machine. SystemTap and user-space markers in Linux packages make it much easier to determine the duration of those operations. The user-space markers compiled into Linux packages mark key points in the code where particular actions occur. The user-space markers also...

Red Hat has actively participated in the ISO group defining the C++ standard for many years, and continues to make a significant contribution. The Red Hat toolchain team was well-represented at the spring meeting of the standardization committee (technically JTC1/SC22/WG21) in Bristol, UK, last month: we had three people there for the full week, with one other visiting a couple of times during the week. In this article, Jason Merrill summarizes the main highlights and developments of interest to Red...

RPM Package Manager (RPM) was created to deliver software to workstations and servers. Besides being an efficient software delivery mechanism, RPM also provides security features that assist system administrators with managing their software and trusting the code that is going into their infrastructure. What is an RPM? RPM is a package management system that bundles software source code or binaries together for easy installation on a computer. These files are tracked and allow for easy installation, upgrading, and removal. Since...

WebSockets are a rising technology that solves one of the great needs of web development - full duplex communication between a browser (or a different client) and a server. Let's imagine a simple scenario - live web chat. In the past, you'd probably use AJAX and polling to make new posts appear in realtime. The downside is that implementing all that is not entirely easy and it tends to put a lot of strain on the server. This article will...

As I stare at this blank screen to start writing my first blog entry I have that same feeling that so many developers have when starting with an unfamiliar programming language or application. The developers in our group realize that it is not easy starting from nothing and we strive to make it easier to productively use SystemTap to investigate performance problems. A starting point for anyone's first use of SystemTap is the SystemTap Beginners Guide on the Red Hat...

Unfortunately, not every application is packaged for every distribution. What do you do when you can't find it packaged for Red Hat Enterprise Linux? If you are like most people, you give up or attempt to install it from source. What happens when installing from source goes badly? If you are like most people, you definitely give up. How do you keep up with application improvements or, perhaps more importantly, security fixes? If you are like most people, you periodically...

Recently, I needed to get Django installed with Python 2.7 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. As this is not a directly supported activity, I wanted to document how I went about it. As you might imagine, the generally expected method for install would be to grab the Python 2.7 source tree and then build it. Obviously, that can be a lot of work; is not particularly repeatable; and, potentially, exposes you to more security flaws. As a result, I...

This technical article covers a subtlety in C++ array allocation and how we changed the GNU C++ compiler to deal with it properly. When a programmer writes T *p = new T[3]; the C++ compiler allocates room for at least three copies of objects of type T on the heap. These objects require 3 * sizeof(T) bytes. For this example, assume sizeof(T) is 12, then it is straightforward to allocate 36 bytes (for example, using malloc). But what happens if...

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux is known for its stability and flexibility, you might not think of it first when looking for the latest version of your web application framework. If you're a developer working with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, you probably want to take advantage of their new features. Sure, you can use RVM, but sometimes you just want to get supported system packages. Software Collections (often abbreviated as SCL) allows you to run more recent versions of...

Did you ever wish you had newer versions of the software on your Red Hat Enterprise Linux machines? You are probably not alone. Providing new versions of software in rpm is hard, because rpm supports only one version installed on your computer at a time. Multiple versions on one machine can conflict with each other or create unpredictable behaviour in applications that you might not have considered dependencies. Last year, we developed Software Collections to allow you to install newer...