CentOS 4.8 in Virtualbox 5.1.x

Years ago I was part of a project that was developed on and ran on CentOS 4.8. The software we developed was only used in-house so we were able to work around any bugs we found. The development cycle was extremely short, 4 months, considering the end result.

While we've backed up the source frequently over the years the software really never got a major facelift. I spent a bit of time over the years making some minor changes (I gave the menu a facelift changing it from rotating gifs to CSS, and made some code changes to deal with a tax shift that happened years ago), but what the project really needs is a major overhaul.

One of my goals right from the outset was to open source the project, but this didn't happen because I was simply too swamped with other things to completely audit the code. Also I wanted to simplify the project before exposing it to the world. Initially we based the project on an eCommerce suite (OSCommerce). At the time we were using that suite for another project and we thought we'd just export the database to another live site based on the same eCommerce suite. That never happened and the eCommerce suite added many more tables and fields we never ended up using (though we added a few of our own).

This all brings me back to the fact that the project was running on CentOS 4.8, an old version of CentOS (which has been on version 7 for awhile). I struggled getting CentOS 4.8 to install in Virtualbox 5.1.x, mostly because I was trying too hard. CentOS would start to boot then hang with an NMI error. The problem was that I was trying to install using the Linux kernel 2.6/3 as a base when what I really needed to do was just select Red Hat 64 (the default). I was overthinking the installation. When I finally tried the default selection for Virtualbox CentOS 4.8 installed just fine.

Comments

I might be upgrading sooner than expected

It looks like I might be upgrading my home desktop workstation sooner than I wanted to. That system was put together December of 2014 and has: AMD A8-5600K APU Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H 16GB GSkill DDR3 1866MHz RAM 2GB NVidia GeForce GTX 650 TI Boost video card (currently a 1GB Radeon HD 6670 for testing) 500GB Samsung 860 SSD (Xubuntu Linux) 1TB WD Blue Drive (Windows 10) Corsair 430 Watt PSU The system has been relatively stable over the years but has recently started to develop a few issues: When recording audio in Xubuntu the audio is stuttering. This may be due to a Pulseaudio update since I don't have the issue in Windows 10 (and I do have the issue with multiple audio sources - web cam, microphone, and in several recording programs: audacity, obs studio). More concerning the system suddenly reboots in the middle of playing Diablo III. I suspect the power supply might be to fault, but if it's not this might mean more expensive purchases. I wanted to hold off to...

Converting an 82 year old to Xubuntu GNU/Linux

A few weeks ago Irvin (not his real name) came into our computer recycling project. Irvin is 82 years old. He walks with a walker and somehow managed to lug a fairly big desktop Lenovo Thinkcentre down to our recycling project. Irvin had been to several computer stores over the past few months trying to get help with his computer. Unfortunately it seems that he wasn't able to get the help he needed despite paying repeatedly for help. Irvin doesn't speak and didn't appear to understand much English, his native language is Russian. Initially one of our volunteers spent a couple of hours over two weeks trying to help Irvin with different issues he was running into. Irvin's computer was old, even by our refurbishing standards - it was running the Lenovo version of Windows XP. Many of the issues Irvin was running into were due to the fact that he was still running Windows XP. Communication was our first issue, but Google Translate seemed to work well enough that we we...

Our media encoding process

It occurred to me that I started posting to debugfs as if I just left off from my old domain (a story for another time). I had something in the order of 300 articles on the site so naturally posts on this site don't have the context they had on the old site. When I first started debugfs I talked about the Handbrake command-line script I run on our KODI server to shrink the size of Blu-rays (since they can be huge). I didn't really get into the details of the whole process and I've since changed how I rip and encode media. When I buy a DVD/Blu-ray the first step I take is to back-up the media using MakeMKV. MakeMKV is great for dumping both Blu-ray and DVD content to a .mkv file. I prefer .mkv over .mp4 because I love subtitles and the .mp4 container only lets you "burn" one subtitle into the file. Files in an .mkv container can contain as many subtitles as the DVD/Blu-ray has. I normally rip these on my desktop workstation which has a late 2013 AMD A8-5...

Debugfs

Search This Blog