James Little

I knew there was a reason I bought a Mac! 47 days of uptime is pretty impressive for any non-server system, let alone a laptop which often rattles around in my bag (when cycling), comes on holiday, stays “asleep” for a whole weekend, etc. etc.

My Macbook's Uptime

And I guess that’s the point really: the sleep function on Apple’s laptops “just works”. In this case I only had to reboot after 47 days for a system update. Of course, it’s generally easy to avoid reboots on most *nix systems, but I’m yet to find a Linux desktop distro/hardware combination where the sleep function reliably works. If anyone out there would like to correct me, that would be most appreciated

Also, who can beat 47 days on a Macbook (or MB Pro)?

This is the latest value rackmount offering from Dell. It’s a great spec for the price, but installation of CentOS 5 seems surprisingly difficult, thanks to the SATA DVD drive used in the unit. RHEL/CentOS doesn’t have the driver for the controller so can’t find the DVD during installation. I’m sure there are other workarounds (network install, USB DVD drive etc.), but eventually I got hold of a Redhat driver disk from Dell Support (it doesn’t seem to be on the Dell site btw).

I’ve uploaded the disk image here; just uncompress it and copy the .img file onto a USB key. At the installation command-prompt type ‘linux dd’ and then hit Enter. You’ll then be asked for the location of the driver disk image; just navigate to the USB disk, select the image, and you’re in business.

SATA driver disk
.zip version