RHEL with the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE)

TDE is the unofficial continuation of the KDE 3 project by a new team or as they put it a desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems with a primary goal of retaining the overall KDE 3.5 computing style,

that took the code when development on it ceased and all resources in the KDE camp moved over to 4. Trinity is more though than KDE 3 in maintenance mode though as they actively progress their own implementations of libcaldav and libcarddav libraries for the PIM-suite (now called Trinity PIM suite) and have taken over maintaining QT 3 with hundreds of patches applied since the last official update.

Is Scientific Linux 6 Right for You? The Review.

Most of you will need no introduction to Scientific Linux, but, as it's sort of customary for a review to give a short overview before getting started I'll do just that.
Scientific Linux is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) much like the CentOS project, rebuilding the distribution from upstream source rpms and removing and replacing the branding that vendor has applied to the installer, slides, wallpapers and whereever else in the system.

Scientific Linux: How To Upgrade To The Latest S.L. 5.x Release

This one is straight out of the FAQ´s on the Scientific Linux website (under documentation) and is certainly not my doing, but I figured it is a bit buried and not everybody might have found it. And it´s a cheap way of adding content to this blog. As it goes simply updating your say 5.4 installation does not automatically bring you to 5.5. To get the full next point release a few additional steps are required. And with Redhat having recently released RHEL 5.6 the corresponding SL release will soon be upon us, although for the moment it looks like they are busy enough getting SL6 ready.

Scientific Linux 6 Alpha 2 Out

Just as promised in the last announcement the Scientific Linux team have released Alpha 2 exactly a week later. At this rate we'll soon have a free Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 clone, which is just as well because the CentOS project seem to be needing more time.
The download links from my previous post are still valid, the previous ISO's have been replaced.
You can also find short release notes here, this time separate for every architecture but nevertheless identical for i386 or for x86_64, particularly interesting for what's been added and changed.
I'm not going to try and turn into Distrowatch and announce every release, but it's quite exciting to see something moving on this front and have a free clone hopefully rather sooner than later. Also, the SL guys are always making some small additions to RHEL that I appreciate.

New Scientific Linux 6 Alpha is Out

Whatever the one I downloaded and installed dated 15th October 2010 was, apparently Alpha 1 was just released to the SL servers a few days ago on 03 December. Here's a link to a short README for release notes. It also says that an improved SL 6 Alpha 2 is to be expected exactly a week later on Friday 10 December.

There are now two DVD's and a boot ISO which can be downloaded at

http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/i386/iso/
http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/x86_64/iso/

for those who would like to help out with testing or are just curious. I should say that the usual caveats about running test releases apply, i.e. do not run in pruduction environment or on anything mission critical which is self-evident.

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.

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).