New System BIOS for Dell XPS 13 7390 1.1.13

Dell released a new System BIOS firmware for Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 version 1.1.3 at the end of last year. This release marked as Urgent, and it fixed the following issues (as taken from Dell’s site): Fixed the incorrect panel size information in the BIOS setup menu. Fixed the issue where the MAC Address Override fails during the Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) boot process. Change default setting of “Enable Thunderbolt (and PCIe behind TBT) pre-boot modules” to disabled by default If your laptop runs Windows 10 and has Dell Update utilities installed, this System BIOS firmware update process is very simple....

February 9, 2020 · 2 min · 269 words · kenno

NVIDIA Driver on Fedora 31 with Kernel 5.4

There’s been problem with NVIDIA driver on my computer running Fedora 31 ever since the kernel has hit version 5.4.*. The issue is that the NVIDIA driver version 435.21, which is installed from rpmfusion-nonfree, can’t be built with kernel 5.4. Here is the version of the akmod-nvidia package: [root@watamem ~]# dnf info akmod-nvidia Last metadata expiration check: 1:48:11 ago on Sun 02 Feb 2020 08:13:26 PM AEDT. Installed Packages Name : akmod-nvidia Epoch : 3 Version : 435....

February 2, 2020 · 4 min · 652 words · kenno

Mounting exFat Filesystem on Fedora

Just a note to remind myself to install packages required to have Fedora based system to recognize SD cards or other drives formatted using exFAT. # dnf install fuse-exfat exfat-utils -y After the above 2 packages installed, just reinsert the SD cards, no reboot is required.

December 21, 2019 · 1 min · 46 words · kenno

New BIOS Firmware for ThinkPad P1 1.25

It looks like Lenovo just released a new firmware for ThinkPad P1 Gen1 again. Here is the changes in this 1.25 release: CHANGES IN THIS RELEASE Version 1.25 [Important updates] - Update includes security fixes. - Addresses CVE-2019-0151 (https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-0151) - Addresses CVE-2019-0152 (https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-0152) - Addresses CVE-2019-0123 (https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-0123) - Addresses CVE-2019-0124 (https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-0124) - Addresses CVE-2019-0117 (https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-0117) - Addresses CVE-2019-0184 (https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-0184) [New functions or enhancements] - Updated the CPU microcode. - Updated Regulatory Information....

December 8, 2019 · 2 min · 370 words · kenno

How to Update Packages on Arch Linux

Finally, I got Arch installed on my ThinkPad X220. This also means that I will need to learn how to install and update software from scratch again. But that’s the fun part, isn’t it? :) Like many other distros, before we can update the installed packages, we need to update the software database (i.e. updated list from the repositories): [root@tora ~]# pacman -Syy Note the above command is similar to apt-get update in Debian/Ubuntu....

December 7, 2019 · 1 min · 173 words · kenno

How to Install Ansible on Centos 8

On most Linux distribution, Ansible can be installed either using python3-pip or ansible package. I’m going to show how to get Ansible installed using the second method on CentOS 8. First add the EPEL repository to the CentOS 8 server. # yum localinstall https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm Next, install ansible package: # yum install ansible Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:49 ago on Sun 10 Nov 2019 09:33:22 PM AEDT. Dependencies resolved. ======================================================================================================================= Package Arch Version Repository Size ======================================================================================================================= Installing: ansible noarch 2....

November 9, 2019 · 2 min · 233 words · kenno

How to Label an XFS Filesystem

When I plugged in an external drive to my laptop, the drive was displayed as a string consits random letters and numbers. Here is an example: ❯❯❯ df -Th | grep sdb /dev/sdb1 xfs 481M 26M 456M 6% /run/media/kenno/5428b182-c92e-466b-89d2-b5b31b80ba48 Though the drive worked perfectly fine, I think it’s ugly, and I wanted to properly give it a good name. Let’s call it externo. But how to do this? You may not believe it, I forgot how to do this....

October 27, 2019 · 2 min · 304 words · kenno

Create a User Account with PowerShell

Today I learned how to create a user account on Windows 10 using PowerShell. Let’s create a small exercise to demonstrate how can this be easily done. Task: “Create a local user account named ’localaccount’ with the password BlueHat. This new user should have admin privilege.” First, launch the PowerShell (terminal?), by running as Administrator. The password will be stored in a variable called $Password: $Password = Read-Host -AsSecureString ******* Now we’re ready to create a new local account:...

October 24, 2019 · 1 min · 161 words · kenno

CTDB Not Starting Up on CentOS 7

While preparing for my Red Hat Gluster Storage Administration exam (EX236), I got stuck at a section of configuring IP failover with CTDB Clustered Trivial Database) for Samba. The problem is that I coudldn’t get the ctdb service running on my home lab running CentOS 7 and a newer version of ctdb. This problem occurs on the following platform and package version: CentOS Linux release 7.7.1908 (Core) ctdb 4.9.1-6.el7 # systemctl status ctdb ● ctdb....

October 13, 2019 · 3 min · 513 words · kenno

New BIOS Firmware for ThinkPad P1 1.24

I’ve been relying on Gnome Software Center to let me know when new ThinkPad P1 firmware is available. Up until today, there is no new firmware available since the last update back in August 2019. However, I stumbled on a post on reddit r/thinkpad, someone mentioned the BIOS 1.26 had been released for X1 Extreme/P1 Gen 2. This made me wonder if there was also new version of BIOS for the P1 Gen 1 that I have....

October 7, 2019 · 3 min · 593 words · kenno