Rittman Mead Consulting » Linux

Running the OBIEE Administratiol tool on Unix using Wine

Borkur Steingrimsson — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:08:58 +0000

The other day I was playing with getting OWB11gR2, which at the time of this writing, has only been released under Linux and Solaris, to run under Windows. In the pursuing comments Jon Mead threw down the gauntlet and asked if I could figure out a way to run the OBIEE Administration tool under Linux. Like many of you might know, most everything in the OBIEE stack runs on Windows as well as various Unixes, but the Administration tool however is only available on Windows. The reason for that being that the tool is written using Microsoft Foundation Classes.

So I set out to give it a go. I picked a random Ubuntu VM image I had laying around and installed Wine (sudo apt-get install wine). After some failed attempts on trying to figure out which DLLs the admintool.exe uses I figured out that the Dependency Walker tool was just what I needed (I still would have preferred to have a proper Windows equivalence of the Unix tool ldd ). Looking at the dependent DLLs I quickly saw that most all of these libraries are contained in the %BIHOME%\server\bin directory. The tricky bit would be to get the MFC libraries in place. A quick Google search suggested to use the Winetricks gadget to install the .NET 2.0 libraries in to Wine

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks && sh winetricks msxml3 dotnet20

This should install a working version of .NET on Wine. The next issue is to set the proper PATH variable in your wine session. I started up a wine Command line util by issuing:

wineconsole cmd

Now, we also need to have the software in place. So grab a complete copy of both the OracleBI and OracleBIData directories from a working Windows installation. Make sure to note the full path of your installation as you want to match the correct path (including drive letters) in Wine. Use the winecfg utility to map a Wine drive letter to the folder where you copied the OBIEE installation to. In my case I had OBIEE installed on E:\BI\. I copied my installation to /mnt/hgfs/BI and configured Wine to map E: to /mnt/hgfs/

Next I created a little .bat file to set the environment to what the admintool.exe expects to find, e:\wine.bat :

set SADATADIR=E:\BI\OracleBIData
set SAROOTDIR=E:\BI\OracleB
set SATEMPDIR=E:\BI\OracleBIData\tmp

set PATH=%PATH%;E:\BI\OracleBI\server\Bin;E:\BI\OracleBI\web\bin;E:\BI\OracleBI\web\catalogmanager;E:\BI\OracleBI\SQLAnywhere;

This makes it possible to now fire up the admintool.exe and open up an .RPD file in Offline mode:

This seems to behave OK and I am happy with what we got. But I still want to be able to connect to an Online server. My Ubuntu has already a working OBIEE installation so I am keen to get the Oracle BI Server ODBC driver set up on my Wine. This is where the winetrick comes in handy again.

sh winetricks jet40 mdac28

This gives me a working Microsoft ODBC for Oracle. A quick Windows Registry hack to register the e:\BI\OracleBI\server\Bin\NQSODBC.dll with the Wine Registry and we are on our way. First I exported the following key from my working Windows XP VM image: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI\Oracle BI Server]. (Make sure to export it using a Win95 format). Import this key in to your wine installation, using wine regedit. Then create a new string value, called Oracle BI Server, in the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI\ODBC Drivers] key, and give it the value Installed. This will tell Wine where to look for your .DLL.

Next step is to simply create a normal ODBC connection to my local BI Server with the odbcad32.exe command in the wineconsole:

Now I fire up the admintool.exe and see if I can connect to my local BI server:

And the joy!

Now, it will be interesting to see if I can actually work with this, but at first glance it looks just fine. Hasn’t crashed on me yet, so I am hopeful it will stick. Next step is to try out the other tools as well, such as the Catalog Manager. These are Java based, so I might as well try and run them natively from Ubuntu …?

OWB 11gR2 Workspace Creation Issues

Stewart Bryson — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:41:03 +0000

First of all, I’d like to thank David Allan of the OWB Product Team for helping me solve the problem I discuss below… and also for identifying what he thinks to be the cause.

A few days after Oracle Database 11gR2 was available, I went about building my first VM to test both the database features as well as OWB. I installed 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 on a VM and then installed the 64-bit version of Oracle Database 11gR2. The database install went just fine, and once complete I executed $ORACLE_HOME/owb/bin/owb to get OWB started, specifying a valid username and password. OWB recognizes that my username is not a registered user of an existing workspace, so it asks me if I want to create a new workspace… or at least register with an existing one.

I select yes, which immediately launches the Repository Assistant. I select the first option, “Manage Warehouse Builder Workspaces”, and then again select the first option: “Create a new Warehouse Builder workspace”. At the next screen, I select “Create a workspace with a new user as workspace owner”.

At Step 6, I provide a username for my new workspace, a password, and a name for the workspace. Then I select Next.

At Step 10, I go ahead and select the username STEWART to be added as a workspace user, and then select next. I then get a summary screen, where I press Finish. Immediately, I get an error involving the installation of the OWBSYS user. The actual exception is “oracle.ide.ExitNotAllowedException” in the process called “processLoadJavaToken”.

I look at the log generated by the Repository Assistant in the $ORACLE_HOME/owb/UnifiedRepos directory… but the only additional piece of information supplied is the following: “Error occurred during Seeding OWBSYS”. This was all quite confusing, as I knew that Mark had successfully built OWB with no issues, and so had Pete Scott, Venkat and others.

At this point, I contacted David Allan and asked if he had seen this error, which he hadn’t. He looked into it a bit further, but in the end, he simply recommended that I clean out the OWBSYS user and then try to “seed” it manually, which simply means creating the required objects in the schema for supporting new workspaces. This is of course what the Repository Assistant is trying to do, but for whatever reason, the seed process in the GUI is not working correctly for me.

To clean out the OWBSYS schema, I use the clean_owbsys.sql script in the $ORACLE_HOME/owb/UnifiedRepos directory. This will drop the OWBSYS user and all roles associated with it.

SQL> @clean_owbsys

User dropped.

User dropped.

Role dropped.

Role dropped.

Role dropped.

SQL>

I follow that up with cat_owb.sql script, which recreates OWBSYS and seeds all the required objects. I truncated some of the output for brevity sake, which I indicated with the “…” characters.

SQL> @cat_owb
Enter Tablespace Name for OWBSYS user:
USERS

Package created.

Package body created.

Create user OWBSYS with default tablespace USERS ...
old   1: CREATE USER OWBSYS IDENTIFIED BY OWBSYS DEFAULT TABLESPACE &owbsys_tbs
new   1: CREATE USER OWBSYS IDENTIFIED BY OWBSYS DEFAULT TABLESPACE USERS

User created.

User OWBSYS has been created.

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Grant succeeded.

...

Grant succeeded.

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Commit complete.

...

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Commit complete.

Role created.

Grant succeeded.

Role created.

Grant succeeded.

Role created.

Grant succeeded.

...

Grant succeeded.

old   1: CREATE USER owbsys_audit IDENTIFIED BY owbsys_audit DEFAULT TABLESPACE &owbsys_tbs
new   1: CREATE USER owbsys_audit IDENTIFIED BY owbsys_audit DEFAULT TABLESPACE USERS

User created.

Grant succeeded.

Grant succeeded.

Synonym created.

...

Synonym created.

Table created.

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

User altered.

User altered.

NOTE: To associate the Control Center with the correct OWB home, now run owb/UnifiedRepos/reset_owbcc_home.sql. You must run the script as a user with java admin privileges. For example, connect as sys as sysdba to run the script.
SQL>

I follow the advice from the cat_owb.sql script, and I execute the reset_owbcc_home.sql.

SQL> @reset_owbcc_home
Enter the full path of the Oracle home for the OWB Control Center install.
If you are installing in a Windows environment, please ensure that the case of the path exactly matches the Oracle install path including the drive letter.

OWB Control Center Home:
/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

SQL>

The cat_owb.sql script recreates and locks the OWBSYS account… so I unlock the account and change the password. Now, when I run the repository assistant I get a different result.

David Allan’s assessment of the cause of this issue is the use of the client tools, namely the Design Client and the Repository Assistant, on a 64-bit Linux platform. According to the certification matrix, none of the OWB client tools are certified on 64-bit Linux. That’s very strange, as it’s unclear why any of the client tools would continue to ship on the 64-bit installations if they shouldn’t be used.

Remember, both the Oracle Database and OWB continue to be supported on 64-bit Linux, it’s just my use of the client tools from that same installation that is not supported. Were I to download a 32-bit Linux installation and use the client tools from that installation to connect to a 64-bit installation… I’d be using a certified solution. And when Oracle starts shipping 11gR2 on Windows, the use of the 32-bit Windows client installation to connect to the 64-bit database installation is supported as well.

I can certainly work around the workspace creation issue, as I showed above, by doing the OWBSYS seeding manually. However, as David points out, I’m opening myself up for lots of issues by using a non-certified OWB client.

Managing multiple Presentation Services on the same Unix box

Borkur Steingrimsson — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:01:45 +0000

As I had mentioned, I wanted to write up a bit on how to go about setting up multiple Oracle BI presentation services, each configured to access a different repository file (RPD) running on the BI Server. The thing is that you can easily set up the BI server so that it manages more than one RPD file. This is done by adding lines in the NQSConfig.ini fil, in the Repository section:

[ REPOSITORY ]
Star = paint.rpd, DEFAULT;
SH = sh.rpd;

If both the RPD files exist in the repository directory, /server/Repository/ , then the server will load all the listed repositories on startup. However, the default installed Presentation Service will only access the DEFAULT marked repository and any request made to the BI Server will be routed to the Star RPD. In order to take advantage of a single BI server running multiple repositories we need to install a presentation service for each repository. These services do not have to be running on the same machine, nor on the same machine as the BI Server.

Install just the presentation service software in a new home, choosing just the presentation service.
Modify the ODBC connection that got created during the installation so that it points to the BI server you already have and change the default repository to use SH (or what ever repository you have in mind). Also, notice that the port of the BI server can be changed, if you have set your BI server to run on a non-default port. Edit the file /setup/odbc.ini and set the parameter ServerMachine= and Repository=SH.
Change the port of the presentation service to use a free port by editing the /web/config/instanceconfig.xml file. I have chosen to use port 9712 instead of the default 9710. Add the following line below the:
Next you need to change the deployed web application to point to the correct host:port of the new presentation service. What I have chosen to do is to have one application server with multiple versions of the analytics.war file deployed. Each deployment points to each presentation service I run, with different URL.After you deploy the WAR file, edit the web.xml file that can be found on the application server (CONTAINER HOME/applications/analytics/analytics/WEB-INF/web.xml) and change the parameters oracle.bi.presentation.sawserver.Host to the BI server hostname and oracle.bi.presentation.sawserver.Port to 9712
Restart the presentation service and the web application
Repeat steps 1 to 5 for each repository you wish to expose choosing a new presentation service port every time.

I hope I didn’t forget anything here, if so I will maintain this post as time goes by.

Installing OBIEE 10.1.3.2.1 on Ubuntu Part II

Borkur Steingrimsson — Sat, 05 May 2007 14:06:38 +0000

Ok, so I tried running the OBIEE installer again, this time choosing only BI Server option. When I read through the install.log I noticed that it was complaining about that the UnixChk.sh didn’t exist. The reason for that was simple, I had renamed it when I was writing the previous post. I renamed the file back to the original name (and made sure it did run successfully) then the actual installation ran fine. This was odd. The script was not used during the startup of the installer nor for any the various screens I was shown, but actually after the installation started.

Here we can see the successful installation screens:

And then on with the show.

First I tried starting the nqsserver. After a few failed tries, I narrowed the solution down to these steps

oracle@borg:~/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/server$ export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun oracle@borg:~/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/server$ export SAROOTDIR=/home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI oracle@borg:~/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/server$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$SAROOTDIR/server/Bin oracle@borg:~/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/server$ export SADATADIR=/home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBIData oracle@borg:~/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/server$ export SATEMPDIR=/home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBIData/tmp oracle@borg:~/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/server$ Bin/nqsserver Oracle BI Server starting... rm: cannot remove `/home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBIData/tmp/nQS_*.TMP': No such file or directory nqsserver: Oracle BI Server started. Version: 10.1.3.2.1.070411.1900.

Later on I found the actual startup scripts, located in the $SAROOTDIR/setup/ directory, called run-sa.sh. Keep in mind that I have never ever installed the OBIEE on Linux before.

Moving on … And then the oc4j container. Here I did have some more problems, since the container simply refused to start, stating that the
oc4jadmin wasn’t configured properly.

oracle@borg:~/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/oc4j_bi/bin$ ./oc4j -start Starting OC4J from /home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/oc4j_bi/j2ee/home ... 07/05/05 14:15:15 Error initializing server: OC4J administrator account is not configured correctly. Please make sure that at least one administration account is created and configured correctly. 07/05/05 14:15:15 Fatal error: server exiting

I found a thread at the Oracle Forums that helped here. I had to add my hostname with IP to the /etc/hosts file. Probably due to the fact that my home network isn’t properly configured for the nslookup and the dhcp

Now that I am satisfied that the server as well as the oc4j components are well installed, I restart the installer

oracle@borg:~/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence$ ./setup.sh

and this time I choose the Presentation Services option .

After the installation, you must start the BI server as well as the SAW server (Presentation Server):

oracle@borg:~/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/setup$ ./run-sa.sh start Oracle BI Server startup initiated. Please wait for a while for the Oracle BI Server to completely start. Execute the following command to check the Oracle BI Server logfile and see if it started. tail -f /home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/server/Log/NQServer.log oracle@borg:~/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/setup$ tail -3 /home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/server/Log/NQServer.log [58002] Query Cache loaded with 0 entries from saved cache files. 2007-05-05 15:38:45 [43030] : Oracle BI Server started. Version: 10.1.3.2.1.070411.1900. oracle@borg:~/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBI/setup$ ./run-saw.sh start Oracle BI Java Host startup initiated. Please check '/home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBIData/web/log/javahost.out.log' for Oracle BI Java Host startup details. Please go to the '/home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBIData/web/log/javahost' directory for Oracle BI Java Host log files after starting up. Oracle BI Presentation Services startup initiated. Please go to the '/home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1/OracleBIData/web/log' directory for Oracle BI Presentation Services log files.

Bob’s your uncle! Log in to the Dasboard and start playing! http://borg.starfleet.fed:9704/analytics/saw.dll?Answers

Installing OBIEE 10.1.3.2.1 on Ubuntu 7.04 … not so fast

Borkur Steingrimsson — Thu, 03 May 2007 22:01:32 +0000

Well, this was a productive 2 hour stint. I just managed to hack my way past the OBIEE installer to get ahead to the actual installation. After downloading the cpio (I chose the RedHat file, since I knew that I could at least install the Oracle Linux because I have the disks laying around somewhere. First step is obviously to deflate the file:

oracle@borg:~/$ cpio -idvm < ./biee_linux_x86_redhat_101321_disk1.cpio .

To start the installer, I simply ran
oracle@borg:~/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence$ export DISPLAY=:0.0 oracle@borg:~/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence$ ./setup.sh

Now the fun started.

Once the installer got going I was greeted with a message: . Fair enough. This is why I started this exercise in the first place, right?
The installation also comes with a shell script that you can run to see if your Linux box is valid for an OBIEE installation, called UnixChk.sh .

oracle@borg:~/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence$ ./UnixChk.sh CHECK FAILED - borg is NOT Oracle Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Linux, or SuSE Linux! rpm: To install rpm packages on Debian systems, use alien. See README.Debian. error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - No such file or directory (2) error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm CHECK FAILED - borg should have Runtime libstdc++.so.6 ! CHECK FAILED - ulimit -n should be at least 10240 or unlimited FAILURE!! - This machine is NOT configured for Oracle BI 10.1.3.2.1

First off, indeed. This isn't an Enterprise Oracle Linux, Oracle RedHat nor Suse Linux. But we can get past that easily. As root, create a file called /etc/redhat-release like this:

echo "Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant 4)" > /etc/redhat-release

Second, some issue with rpm being used on a Debian system (i.e. Ubuntu) . As it turns out, the script is simply using rpm to check if the libstdc++.so.6 libraries are installed. I know it is (locate libstdc++.so.6 ) so I simply commented out the test from the script, lines 941 to 955

#ptch=1 #for PL in `rpm -qa | grep libstdc++` #do # CPPPL6=`rpm -ql $PL | grep $stdcpplib | tail -1` # if [ ! -z $CPPPL6 ] # then # ptch=0 # fi #done

#if [ $ptch = 1 ]
# then
# echo "CHECK FAILED - $h should have Runtime $stdcpplib !"
# failure=1
#fi

The third issue, has to do with security settings on system level. By default my user, oracle, doesn't have permissions to have more than 1024 files open at any given time

oracle@borg:~/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence$ ulimit -n 1024

Once again as root, we edit the file /etc/security/limits.conf and add the following lines,

oracle soft nofile 2000 oracle hard nofile 10240

This should do the trick, but for the changes to take effect you must start a new session for your oracle user.

oracle@borg:~/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence$ ./UnixChk.sh /home/oracle/product/obiee10.1.3.2.1 SUCCESS!! - This machine is configured for Oracle BI 10.1.3.2.1


That's more like it!
Now, we run the setup.sh again and see what happens. This is what happens:  . but but but but ...? Seems the setup.sh doesn't even use this UnixChk.sh script I just spent 30 mins on getting to work. Just great. And here I was thinking the real fun had started and was over with. Far from it. The setup.sh script is just quick wrapper to start the Java installer, and test for supported platform is done 'somewhere inside' that 600mb .jar file, called setup.jar
oracle@borg:~/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence$ ls -lrt setup.jar

-rw-r--r-- 1 oracle oracle 636777135 2007-04-12 08:44 setup.jar
A quick peek in that file, showed some interesting classes, such as
oracle@borg:~/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence$ unzip -l setup.jar |grep RedHat

2782  04-11-07 23:37   com/siebel/analytics/install/ValidateRedHatLinux.class

1669  04-11-07 23:37   com/ibm/wizard/platform/linux/LinuxRedHatCommands.class
That first one looks like it could be of some help here.

borkur@borg:~/Oracle/OBIEE/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence$ unzip setup.jar com/siebel/analytics/install/ValidateRedHatLinux.class

Archive:  setup.jar

inflating: com/siebel/analytics/install/ValidateRedHatLinux.class 
Now we have a class file that is quite likely to be used to test if the machine running the installer is actually a Redhat Linux. But how can we peek inside it? A quick Google gave me some choices of tools to reverse engineer Java classes. One that seemed to work just fine is called jad. Running jad on the classfile showed me that the not only does the installer read from the /etc/redhat-release file but also from the pseudo-file /proc/version which is not something I wanted to try to mess with (e.g. recompiling a kernel to fake the signature there). So, why not just alter this file and put it back in the setup.jar file?
package com.siebel.analytics.install;

import com.installshield.wizard.WizardBeanCondition;

import java.io.*;

public class ValidateRedHatLinux extends WizardBeanCondition

{

public ValidateRedHatLinux()

{

}

public boolean evaluateTrueCondition()

{

return true;

}

public String defaultName()

{

return "Validate if the OS is correct Red Hat Linux.";

}

public String describe()

{

return "Condition check bean that evaluates to true if the OS os correct Red Hat Linux.";

}

}


And then compile it back to a class file:
oracle@borg:~/$ javac -classpath /home/oracle/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence/setup.jar ValidateRedHatLinux.java

----------

1. WARNING in ValidateRedHatLinux.java (at line 3)

import java.io.*;

^^^^^^^

The import java.io is never used

----------

1 problem (1 warning)
Finally we need to get the newly compiled class file back in to the monster jar file.
oracle@borg:~/RH_Linux/Server/Oracle_Business_Intelligence$ cp ValidateRedHatLinux.class com/siebel/analytics/install/ValidateRedHatLinux.class

zip setup.jar com/siebel/analytics/install/ValidateRedHatLinux.class


and then run the installer again, using the modified setup.jar
    
But, seems this is far as I got. Once the installer started running, it just sat there dead. I left it running for the night but the only thing that happened was that some files got copied in to the OracleBI :(
I might give it another go, to track down why the installer doesn't at least copy all the files in place but that remains to be seen. Now I ask myself, Was it worth it? Was this failed attempt any good? Sure it was. It was fun and what better way to spend 2 hours of your time, once the kid is in bed and the wife is away in Spain? :)



Ubuntu 7.04
Borkur Steingrimsson — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:54:10 +0000

The new Ubuntu 7.04 (feisty fawn) is out. I used the built-in upgrade facilities to get the new release. After 2-3 failed attempts to get the full upgrade started, I finally got the pleasure of watching the download progress bar telling me that I had some 3 hours to wait. After downloading all the new packages and applying the upgrades, it was time for a reboot (the new version has a new kernel version as well). That’s where things got interesting. The menu.lst file for grub no longer looked right. It turned out to be looking for the root device on the wrong partition… Windows still booted fine. After trying a few combinations of drives and partitions I got it back up.
Some Icons have changed but on first glance I didn’t see all that many changes. I guess I will discover some as I go a long.



Ubuntu and Beryl: A healthy breakfast
Borkur Steingrimsson — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:29:40 +0000
I finished banging Beryl in to my newly installed Ubuntu box last night. I run a dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.10. The mix of IDE and SATA disks made Grub gag a bit but it all went ok in the end. I had previously installed Fedora Core (from 1 to 5) but decided to give Ubuntu a try.
I stumbled up on this link which gave me the idea to give Beryl a try. I had a few issues with the Nvidia drivers, but this how-to solved all my problems. Now I have all sorts of cool animation clogging my screen :)
Without having even googled for it yet, I have some reservations of being able to get a database installed there, but perhaps Wine can handle it? It seems to handle most anything I have thrown at it so far, e.g. Max Payne and Serious Sam run pretty smoothly there.



A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Recommendations for Linux Support
Mark Rittman — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000
I just got in an hour or so ago after a week spent over in Ireland. As I

mentioned the other day, I was due to do a bit of presales work with a public

sector client, and I took the opportunity to

spend the

weekend in Belfast with Janet and the kids and the rest of her family over

there. Amazingly, for once the weather over in Belfast was better than back home

and we spent Saturday around town, down by the new

Titanic

Quarter and in W5. W5 is a kind of

"Science Museum and kids play centre" at the Odyssey Centre with lots of

interactive

displays, 

multimedia PCs and a

kids play area,

not a bad way to spend a January afternoon if you’ve got children to keep

occupied.


One thing that didn’t go so well last week was the gradual breakdown of all

the technology I took over with me. As per usual I took over enough gadgets with

me to fill a branch of Dixons, with my work laptop, iPod, 3G data card, mobile

phone and lots of little add-ons and accessories. Things started to go wrong on

Monday when my laptop’s hard disk started spinning and whirring and clicking

when I tried to boot it up, and I had to wait until about two hours after I

first switched it on before the "Welcome to Windows XP" screen came up. The same

thing happened again the next day, and so I started copying all the files onto

my external hard disk in case it was about to give up on me for good. Next, and

presumably completely unrelated, the light behind the LCD screen went, which

meant that I had to borrow a flat screen monitor from the client to get any work

done. By this time though the disk had started working OK again – strange.
Next calamity though was me dropping the laptop backpack on the floor, which

didn’t affect the laptop but broke the 3G data card that was still plugged in

the PCMCIA slot – so that’s what the PC Card carrying case was for… These

things happen though, so although I could only use my laptop with an external

monitor, and I’d lost 3G access, I still had my phone … or at least I did have

it, until on Saturday morning the on/off switch on the top of it broke, and I

couldn’t use the phone now either.
Anyway, the upshot of all this was that by Saturday morning I’d managed to

break my laptop, 3G card and mobile phone and I was reduced to using Teletext to

catch up with the football scores (Arsenal still lost, which softened the blow

somewhat) and my brother-in-law’s PC running Windows Me and with a 26k

connection to try and keep up with emails. Eventually even I saw the futility of

this and decided to take a break from it all until I got back to England.
As I’m now in the market for a phone (work’ll replace the laptop and 3G card,

thankfully) it got me thinking again about getting one with decent (or any, to

be honest) Linux synchronization support. Every year or so I go through a phase

where I try and migrate my work and home PCs to Linux – for the obvious reasons

really, it’s just the "right" thing to do, and it’s some good experience that’ll

be useful for work – but I always get scuppered by poor driver and peripheral

support. Now that I’m suddenly in the market for a new phone, it sounds like a

good chance to get one that is syncable using GNOME or KDE. Does anyone know of

a phone – a recent one, ideally something by Nokia or SonyEricsson – that syncs

out of the box with GNOME or KDE? If it helps, I’m on Orange in the UK, usually

sync using a USB cable, and ideally want to sync with Evolution or Thunderbird

although being honest syncing with anything would be a bonus.
Whilst we’re on the hardware subject I’ve recently been given a budget for

getting new laptops for the team at work and we usually get stuff like this from

Dell – no problems here and I’ve never had a problem with them before, excepting

the laptop backlight going out of course. What I’m looking for particularly now

though is a range of laptops, ideally backed by a mainstream vendor such as

Dell, IBM, HP and so on – where all of the hardware has Linux drivers. I’d like

to get my team working with Linux if possible – or at least make it easy for

them – and what I’m looking for is a laptop range where the Wifi cards, modems

and so on have easy to obtain, working Linux drivers. I think for the Dell

machine I use – a Precision M60 – you can get Wifi working with



third-party drivers from a company called Linuxant but what I really want is

a machine where the vendor sorts out the drivers for you. If anyone knows or

uses such a setup please write in and let me know.
That’s it for now. On Tuesday we’ve got the

UKOUG Business

Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG, where I’ll hopefully be meeting up with

Peter Scott and listening to

Jeff

Moss’s presentation on Data Warehouse Performance Tuning. After that, I’ve

got a few days off and we’re flying over to Nice, so updates will be a bit

irregular for the next week or so.



VMWare Player Prebuilt Virtual Machines
Mark Rittman — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000
Spotted

via



Duncan Lamb‘s site: the

"Community Virtual

Machines" page on the VMWare website, where you can download prebuilt

virtual machines for use with VMWare and the new (free) VMWare Player,

including:

Debian Sarge 3.1
Fedora Core 4
Fedora Core 5 Test 1
FreeBSD 6.0
KDE on SuSE OSS 10.0
Kubuntu (KDE on

	Ubuntu)

Of course there’s the standard "supported" VMs as well, including ones for

Ubuntu,

SuSE 10,

Oracle on Red Hat and

mySQL on SuSE. Sounds

like an excellent way to try out a new distro or development environment without

worry about laptop hardware compatibility.



OTN Step-By-Step Guide To Installing 10g On Linux x86
Mark Rittman — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Installation

Guide: Oracle Database 10g on Linux x86: "This is the first in a

series of guides that provide all the steps for installing the major components

of Oracle 10g software on Linux. All three of the certified

English-language distributions of Linux are covered in detail (Asianux is not

covered), and the articles assume that inexpensive Intel x86 hardware is being

used. The articles walk through the process of installation and configuration on

commodity hardware for the purpose of evaluating the major Oracle 10g

products. 
The ultimate goal of this series is to walk through

installing and configuring all of the components of a 10g Grid.

Along the way, you will see how to install and configure a single instance

Oracle 10g database (this article), a two-node Oracle RAC 10g

database, all the major components of Oracle Application Server 10g

and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control. 
This series will take the approach of offering the

easiest paths, with the fewest number of steps, for accomplishing a task. This

approach often means making configuration choices that would be inappropriate

for anything other than an evaluation. For that reason, this series is not

appropriate for building production-quality environments, nor does it reflect

best practices. 
The three Linux distributions certified for Oracle

10g covered in these articles are: 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux  2.1 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 

If you are new to Linux and/or Oracle, this first

article is for you. It starts with the basics and walks you through an

installation of Oracle Database 10g from the bare metal up."

An excellent tutorial, including screenshots and step by step instructions,



now available on OTN.