BoxGrinder is a tool that allows you to build virtual machines (with RedHat, CentOS, Scientific Linux or Fedora as the OS) for multiple virtualization techniques. Currently it supports KVM, VMware, Amazon EC2, VirtualBox, and VirtualPC. This tutorial shows how to use BoxGrinder to create a CentOS 6 KVM guest on Fedora 17 and also how to deploy it to a remote KVM host.

I'm calling this the tip of the year because it's easy to do and dramatically improves the Web-browsing experience in Firefox for users of Fedora, Red Hat and CentOS. I wish I had figured it out years ago because it's a simple way to increase your scrolling speed in the browser.

This is a quick tutorial on disabling IPV6 in Fedora 12 and CentOS 5.5

echo -e "install ipv6 /bin/true\nblacklist ipv6" > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ipv6.conf

Stop ip6tables service and disable it from starting automatically at system boot.

Doing a one-off installation of CentOS on an odd piece of hardware involves some work. In the case of my netbook "some work" is quite the understatement. CentOS 5.x is based largely on Fedora 6, now more than two and a half years old and largely viewed as obsolete.

This guide explains how to integrate XCache into PHP5 on a Fedora 13 or CentOS 5.5 system (with Apache2). From the XCache project page: "XCache is a fast, stable PHP opcode cacher that has been tested and is now running on production servers under high load." It's similar to other PHP opcode cachers, such as eAccelerator and APC.

The CentOS project, which has apparently settled a dispute that threatened to lead to a fork, released CentOS 5.4. Reflecting changes made to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, CentOS 5.4 upgrades 266 packages, adds 27, and implements preview versions of the ext4 file-system and KVM hypervisor.

While Fedora is too bleeding edge, Red Hat (and Centos) is too conservative. They are poles apart and don't offer anything in between.

CentOS / Fedora Core / RHEL 5 uses yum for software management. Yum allows you to add a new repository as a source to install binary software.

Back in March we had compared the performance of Ubuntu and Fedora as we tested Ubuntu 6.10 and Fedora 6 along with development versions of Ubuntu 7.04 and Fedora 7. During those benchmarks, Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 5 had a slight lead over Fedora but the race was extremely close. In August we compared Ubuntu and Fedora again along with Xubuntu, Mandriva, and SimplyMEPIS, but using older PC hardware.