Posts

If you’re still running ThinkPad P1 Gen 1 (Type 20MD, 20ME) like me, there is an exciting news, at least to me. Lenovo just released a new BIOS/UEFI firmware updated at version 1.27 on Mar 20, 2020. Changes in this releases: CHANGES IN THIS RELEASE Version 1.27 [Important updates] - Addresses CVE-2019-0185 (https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-0185) Refer to Lenovo's Security Advisory page for additionalinformation about LEN-27714 "Multi-vendor BIOS Security Vulnerabilities". (https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/LEN-27714) - Security fix addresses LEN-29406 "ST Microelectronics TPM Firmware ECDSA Signature Generation Vulnerability"....

Though a new firmware was release for ThinkPad X1 Carbon G6 since last month, 2020/01/23, I only found about this today. Unlike the firmware for Dell’s laptop, once can easily update it with fwupmgr if your Linux system supports it. Here’s what’s changed in this release. CHANGES IN THIS RELEASE Version 1.45 <1.45> UEFI: 1.45 / ECP: 1.20 - (Fix) Fixed an issue where a system hardware controller device might disappear at 2nd boot....

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....

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....

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.

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....

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....

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....

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....

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:...