How to install ffmpeg on CentOS

One of the most useful tools for multimedia conversions (audio/video) is ffmpeg. This tool has a long tradition: started in 2000, it is used by many Linux programs (both command line and with visual interface). In order to install it, you will need to setup first RPMforge and Epel repositories. You can find here the… Read More »

Useful yum repositories

Yum is the easiest tool to find and install packages on Red Hat/CentOS. However, yum needs to know where to look for packages. Here is where repositories come into play. Of course, you always need to make sure the repositories you use are trusted! Installing packages from untrusted source can be pretty nasty since you… Read More »

i386 vs x86_64

You might have noticed in various places (packages, commands) these 2 terms: i386 and x86_64. What do they mean and why should you care? They simply represent the architecture of the software used: x86_64 is for 64 bit processors  i386 is for 32 bit processors

How to change the hostname

One of the basic (yet very useful) operation you can do on a server is to change the hostname. The hostname is basically a label you assign to it so you can identify it more easily. To change it you need to edit the file /etc/sysconfig/network: HOSTNAME=myserver.domain.com

How to replace all occurrences in a text

One of the nasty tasks you sometimes have to do is to duplicate one file and replace a certain text (for example a subdomain name) with a different one (maybe another subdomain name?). Sure, you can just go and edit it manually, you can download the file, use Find/Replace in an editor and I’m sure… Read More »

How to use yumdownloader

Everyone uses yum command to install packages on Red Hat/CentOS platforms, but not many people actually care what happens behind the scene. Did you know that the packages installed by yum and nothing more than rpm files? Sure, in 90% of the cases you don’t really care .. if it works, well .. it works.… Read More »

Useful yum commands

The yum command is one of the most useful for Red-Hat/CentOS family server. It is basically  a command-line package-management utility. Red-Hat/CentOS packages are provided as .rpm files which can be installed either using the rpm command, or with yum. The nice thing about yum is that it allows you to add external repositories and you can… Read More »

How to check current CPU usage

One of the most common problems of a VPS server is the CPU usage. Of course, each process that runs on the machine requires CPU resources. The most common measure of CPU usage on Linux is the server load. Basically, the bigger the load value, the more your CPU is used. To see the current… Read More »