Posts Tagged ‘RHEL5’

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Installation Cannot Find Devices

September 8th, 2008 No Comments

In the process of installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) on a brand new Dell Optiplex 755, I came across the following error:

Unable to find any devices of the type needed for this installation type. Would you like to manually select your driver or use a driver disk?

Another symptom to this problem is the installation continuing in Text mode despite the command to install in GUI mode. You know you are in Text mode if you have no mouse control.

A quick workaround to the device request problem is to switch the SATA operation to “AHCI” mode in the BIOS. AHCI (stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface) allows communcation to SATA devices. With this setting, I started the installation without any other parameters. The installation went smoothly and took about six minutes to complete. Boot up to RHEL5 was error free as well.

Note that many sites recommend and alternative solution of switching the BIOS to “legacy” mode. I initially tried this method and found it greatly extended the installation time to over twenty minutes. It seems that switching to legacy mode has a major performance hit. Additionally, after the switch to legacy mode, a post installation problem occurred where the initial boot up resulted in a {}.

If you are still having challenges installing RHEL 5, refer to this great reference: http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/rhel5/installation_guide/index.html

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Missing libXm.so in Red Hat (RHEL5)

May 9th, 2008 2 Comments

After a clean installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) with an active subscription, I came across an immediate problem when attempting to run an application. I get the following error:

libXm.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The first step is to insure that the files are actually missing. The easiest way to confirm if the file exists on the system is to run the locate command. Try the below linux command below which will return a list of similar files.

locate libXm.so

The number after libXm.so is merely the version number. If you are missing libXm.so.3, but you have libXm.so.4, you can create a symbolic link (-s) from file libXm.so version 4 to version 3 with the below linux command.

ln -s libXm.so.4 libXm.so.3

It turns out that I was missing a motif package, and that by installing openmotif (a perfect motif alternative) will quickly resolve the issue. Try the following below:

yum install openmotif22.i386 openmotif22.x86_64

Say yes to both prompts to complete the openmotif installation.

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