storegrid installation on 64 bit RHEL / CentOS systems

Vembu’s excellent tech support helped me quickly resolve this problem. We ran into it again later on a different system and the same solution worked again:

Generally the StoreGrid apache installation will link the ‘libexpat.so’ filefrom the ‘/usr/lib’ directory. The error “/usr/lib/libexpat.so: could not read symbols: File in wrong format” will occur either when ‘/usr/lib/libexpat.so’ is a non-64 bit version (may be a 32 bit .so file) or the file is corrupted.

Please follow the below steps to resolve the issue:

1) Rename ‘/usr/lib/libexpat.so’ as ‘/usr/lib/oldlibexpat.so’.

2) Copy the ‘/usr/lib64/libexpat.so’ as ‘/usr/lib/libexpat.so’.

So, as root:

mv /usr/lib/libexpat.so /usr/lib/oldlibexpat.so
cp /usr/lib64/libexpat.so /usr/lib/libexpat.so

We also found another package needed to be installed:


yum install compat-libstdc++-33

The installation should run successfully.

Suspend/Resume with linux laptops

Suspend/Resume can be tricky, since it is not always apparent what is not working. With a Dell Latitude D531 and Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 it simply took installing the latest ATI video driver from ATI’s web site. For a Dell Precision M4300 and RHEL 5.1, it took installing the latest Nvidia driver. The wifi (Intel 3945) driver needs to be reset after resuming. I adapted a script I found and connected it to a launcher on the panel.

echo "Resetting Network"
sudo /etc/init.d/NetworkManagerDispatcher stop
sleep 5
sudo /etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop
sleep 5
sudo /etc/init.d/network stop
sleep 5
sudo /etc/init.d/ipw3945d stop
sleep 35
sudo /etc/init.d/ipw3945d start
sleep 5
sudo /etc/init.d/network start
sleep 5
sudo /etc/init.d/NetworkManager start
sleep 5
sudo /etc/init.d/NetworkManagerDispatcher start


gnome keyboard shortcuts

It is very easy to assign keyboard shortcuts for common tasks or special laptop buttons in gnome. I regularly do this with my ubuntu, RHEL, and CentOS. I use gnome with all three. You simply choose System:Preferences:Keyboard Shortcuts. Click on the function you want to change, then hit the button or key combination you’d like to assign.  Easy as that.