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Entries tagged "scientificlinux".

ScientificLinux 6

14th November 2010

Apparently the people at CERN & FermiLab have rolled their sleeves, too, as there is already an alpha iso available for download:
ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/iso/
For those who don't know, ScientificLinux is Centos' less popular brother (born from the same mother - RedHat), built by and for the people at CERN and FermiLab.
Exciting times!
Tags: centos, redhat, scientificlinux. | No comments

Transmission bittorrent client for EL6

24th May 2011
As it turns out there's no graphical bittorrent client in EL6, therefore a quick copy/paste tip so you don't end up butchering your favourite OS like this guy (though he was trying to achieve smth a tad different):
wget ftp://ftp.lug.ro/fedora/linux/releases/14/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/transmission-common-2.04-2.fc14.1.x86_64.rpm ftp://ftp.lug.ro/fedora/linux/releases/14/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/transmission-gtk-2.04-2.fc14.1.x86_64.rpm
yum localinstall --nogpgcheck transmission-common-2.04-2.fc14.1.x86_64.rpm transmission-gtk-2.04-2.fc14.1.x86_64.rpm

Modify the paths accordingly if you're on 32 bit arch.

Enjoy! ;-)
Tags: bittorrent, centos, el6, rhel, scientificlinux, tip, transmission. | No comments

Libreoffice repo for EL6

17th December 2011
For those people who wanted to use Libreoffice on their EL6 workstations there weren't many options; basically you had to download a tarball from libreoffice.org and `rpm -ivh` the contained rpms manually - not the best way to have it installed and relatively painful to keep up to date.

But no more - I've been backporting Libreoffice for a while now from Fedora and you're free to use it!
Also, recently I noticed there are RHEL conditionals in the spec files. For those unfamiliar with RPM building this means Redhat is probably getting ready to include Libreoffice in their enterprise distro.

I don't know when we'll see Libreoffice in EL 6 officially but I know it won't be in v6.3. Until then you can use my repo - it should gracefully upgrade existing stock openoffice.org installations:

To install do the following as root:

rpm -ivh http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/libreoffice/el6/i386/nux-libreoffice-release-0-1.el6.nux.noarch.rpm
yum install libreoffice

To upgrade from stock openoffice.org:

rpm -ivh http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/libreoffice/el6/i386/nux-libreoffice-release-0-1.el6.nux.noarch.rpm
yum update

To replace Libreoffice installed from the official libreoffice.org rpms:

yum remove libreoffice\* libobasis\*
rpm -ivh http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/libreoffice/el6/i386/nux-libreoffice-release-0-1.el6.nux.noarch.rpm
yum install libreoffice

If you run into issues feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line: rpm @ li.nux.ro

Tags: centos, el6, libreoffice, openoffice, rhel, scientificlinux. | No comments

Hardware accelerated video playback on EL6 (RHEL, Centos, SL) and Intel SandyBridge

23rd June 2012
Recently I got to play with a linux laptop that had an NVidia card and was impressed by how well and efficient mplayer is when using VDPAU.
My personal laptop however is an all-Intel one with a 2nd generation i5 SandyBridge CPU and no NVidia GPU, but an Intel HD 3000. This is quite a popular setup nowadays and this is actually great because it turns out we can have hardware accelerated playback using entirely open source software, no binary blob required. Linus will be happy. :-)

Don't get me wrong, this is a great machine and mplayer uses around 30% of one core when playing 1080p video, however this is no match for the under 10% when using NVidia's VDPAU.

So let's start. What we need is LibVA from splitted-desktop.com and gstreamer-vaapi (to enable acceleration in Totem) or/and a version of mplayer with VAAPI patches. I'll assume you are using Stella or EL6 with my repo nux-dextop.

yum install libva-freeworld gstreamer-vaapi
And that's it, open some HD content in Totem (aka Movie Player) and behold low CPU usage.

Thanks to Tux99 at SL forum for packaging gstreamer-vaapi.

If you want to use mplayer though we need to work a bit more and build it from source (until I'll make a package of it).
We need to install some development packages first: 
yum install gcc make freetype-devel alsa-lib-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel yasm-devel patch subversion libva-freeworld-devel

Next we need to get mplayer-vaapi and build it: 
cd ~/Downloads
wget http://www.splitted-desktop.com/static/libva/mplayer-vaapi/mplayer-vaapi-20110127.tar.bz2
tar xjf mplayer-vaapi-20110127.tar.bz2
cd mplayer-vaapi-20110127
./checkout-patch-build.sh
...wait for the build process to finish then you can merely copy the mplayer binary to somewhere in the path and that's it - we do this not to overwrite or mess up other pre-existing mplayer installatons in the system. 
cd mplayer-vaapi
mkdir -p ~/bin
cp mplayer ~/bin/mplayer-vaapi

At this point we're pretty much done, try testing it by playing some HD mp4 file with the following parameters: -vo vaapi -va vaapi. 
mplayer-vaapi -vo vaapi -va vaapi /path/to/HDvideo.mp4
and enjoy low CPU usage. :-)

If you want to skip inputing these parameters each time you want to use VA-API then simply add the following to ~/.mplayer/config : 
vo=vaapi,xv,
va=vaapi


Here's the difference on my system:

Stock MPlayer, no acceleration:


VA-API enabled MPlayer:


This should work across all i3/i5/i7 chipsets (Intel HD 2000 & 3000), feedback welcome.
Tags: centos, el6, intel, libva, mplayer, sandy bridge, scientificlinux, stella, vaapi. | No comments

Install Skype on CentOS 7 (and other RH clones)

14th August 2014
Hello there. CentOS 7 is a fresh and major release, but fear not, Skype works well on it.
As usual, just yum install skype if you have my nux-dextop repo installed or just grab the latest RPM from here http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el7/x86_64/ and install it.

Don't be shy and let me know if you encounter any issues - rpm at li.nux.ro !
Tags: centos, linux, scientificlinux, skype, springdale. | No comments