Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Some PDF gadgets

Here some PDF gadgets that I came about (a friend of mine told me about them):

Scribus: an editor for PDFs, it also permits to insert new elements
Xournal: to assemble several PDFs in order to make a PDF collection (a conference proceedings for instance).

#---
yum -y install scribus xournal
#---

Webcam security programs

Recently I was looking for webcam security tools, or CCTV if you will, and bumped into Motion and ZoneMinder.

The first is more simple and works like a "home-made"/"semi-pro" tool but you need an extra effort to get it compiled in Fedora 9 (you can get an RPM version here, which did the trick for me).

The ZoneMinder is a lot complexer and has a lot of features. But the documentation (for the new version, which is already on standard Fedora distribution) is poor and did not instruct you so well. I didn't like it very much because you need Apache and MySQL, which I usually do not need. So I preferred the Motion. Just to the sake of it, to install ZoneMinder:

#---
yum -y install zoneminder httpd mysql-server
chkconfig --level 345 httpd on
chkconfig --level 345 mysqld on
chkconfig --level 345 zoneminder on
#---


You need to add, per hand, the MySQL users, passwords, and database (refer to the documentation, I got fed up with it).

As soon as I get experienced with it I will report on that.

Monday, September 15, 2008

VirtualBox do not start: KVM

Maybe it also happens to you: you try to start a virtual machine from VirtualBox and you hit an error message: "Disable KVM/VMX extensions" or something similar. The problem is: for some reason the new kernels (after 2.6.25) load some extensions. You just need to remove them. Execute the following as root:

Search for the modules:
#---
lsmod | grep kvm
#---


If there is any loaded module, unload them, in my case (respect the dependency order):
#---
rmmod kvm_intel
rmmod kvm
#---


Now try to start your machine. For me it did the trick.