Booting RHEL/CentOS from USB

If you are installing CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a machine without a DVD or CD drive, then your best option is to create a bootable USB drive. The Red Hat manual provides instructions for Linux, and it is simple to translate these instructions for Windows:

  • Download dd for Windows, as well as diskboot.img from your OS distribution media.
  • Write the disk image to your USB drive using the command dd if=diskboot.img of=\\.\x: --progress, where x is the Windows drive letter of your USB drive. The --progress flag is optional and lets you see that the records are actually copying to the USB drive.

That’s it!

REBOL/View without X in Linux

If you want to write a command-line, windowless Linux application, but need to use the extended features of REBOL/View, such as DLL access, then you are unfortunately out of luck. Attempting to run REBOL in a console results in the following error:

[root@dot ~]# ./rebol -ivwt
** User Error: Bad face in screen pane!
** Near: size-text self
[root@dot ~]#

The only alternative seems to be to purchase a commercial license for REBOL/SDK.

MySQL Cluster Watchdog Warning Under VMWare

I’m not sure why I’m getting this from within a VMWare session when running MySQL Cluster:

WARNING: timerHandlingLab now: 4194521 sent: 4194399 diff: 122
2010-02-01 18:05:14 [ndbd] INFO 
     -- Watchdog: User time: 7  System time: 52
2010-02-01 18:05:14 [ndbd] WARNING  
     -- Watchdog: Warning overslept 227 ms, expected 100 ms.

How can I increase the watchdog timer? This is definitely a problem that seems exclusive to running in a virtual machine, but I need to do so for simulation purposes.