tweaks around Oracle 11g on Hardy 64bit

I did an oracle 11g 64bit install on my 64bit core 2 quad using the resources available on internet and some past experience.

The tutorial here is great :

http://www.pythian.com/blogs/968/installing-oracle-11g-on-ubuntu-804-lts-hardy-heron

However, some things still show up after the initial setup is done. Here are bits of my experience -

1. Starting Enterprise manager after a reboot -
Try emctl status agent
The last line of the output should tell you whats happening. If its not running, start it using the following -
emctl start dbconsole
This thanks to http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/linux-5-oracle-11g-enterprise-manager-question-616532/

2. The ORACLE_SID variable must be declared in either /etc/profile (for a single database on the system) or on user's local profile.

Useful mysql stuff...

Here's a compilation of my day to day use of mysql related stuff...

1. Resetting root password in mysql
   - Goto this page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MysqlPasswordReset
   
   
2. To give privileges to a certain user in mysql
   - grant all on *.* to username
   
   
3. 
   

Finally... IE on Linux / Ubuntu...

Great..... It works... :)

Initially, when I needed to run a few IE specific sites on my Ubuntu installation, I spent quite some time searching around google, and some more prominent linux sites... But I did not hit success...

Today however, my search bore fruit... I found IEs4Linux project, and its so damned simple.

I am still running Hardy (not Interpid) on my desktop, and wine (the default). I picked up the instructions, kind of updated them myself to work in my hardy, and bingo.. it installed and works...absolutely.

Here's what I did -

1. Found this page for installation instructions on Ubuntu :
   http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Installation:Ubuntu
   
   
2. Run the following commands -

3. sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install wine cabextract

4. And then run this -
   

5. wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
   tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
   cd ies4linux-*
   ./ies4linux
   

6. The last one would open a dialog box and would ask you basic questions about what version do you want, choose what u like and bingo.. it would start installation...
   
   
7. Within minutes, it automatically downloads some files from here and there, and is done.
   
   
8. It just works...

My new quad core desktop system...

Recently managed to get a desktop system home, especially after coming back, it was necessary. The laptop just doesnt provide enough power.

This sure looks like a monster for a desktop system usage.

- Quad Core CPU (Core 2 Quad Q6600) at 2.4 GHz, 8 MB L2 Cache
- 2 GB RAM @800 MHz
- 250 GB Seagate Barracuda Hard Disk
- Here I was a bit disappointed. My local vendor just couldnt manage to get me a 10K rpm or higher hard disk from his supplier. He kept saying it would require a SCSI card and all that configuration. From my understanding it should be a simple SATA or SATA2 disk. But, well, this is the first one in place, may be we'd have more... :)

So, with this system in place, I plan to do some interesting things... e.g. running my long awaited local oracle server so that I can work with apex (http://apex.oracle.com)

Running Hardy on it. To say the least, hardy flies on this system. To start with, everything was detected normally on this configuration and I had no difficulty to make it work with Ubuntu Hardy. Even the live CD worked fine.

Now with the installed copy along with all the updates so far, the system literally flies... The system monitor shows me 4 CPUs and it adds so damned much to my confidence in using this power.... :)

The only issue I have found till now is with my power supply ratings/configuration. It somehow draws a lot of power (the rating on the PSU box says 450W) whereas the Display is not connected to the CPU power (its a TFT anyway). The UPS that I have is a APC with 500 VA rating. The UPS just doesnt hold.

All the power from the UPS comes to just this system and the display. Still it doesnt hold. About the power supply, I was told that the rating (450W) is an indication of how much can this provide, not how much does it need all the time. That might be wrong or right both. I am still figuring that out. No idea till now.

Installing Oracle 11g on Ubuntu server 64bit on vmware server 2 beta

I have this wish to install a hardy server version on my system. Since I did not want to add another partition, so I chose to do that inside a virtual machine (using vmware). vmware supports 64bit Guest Operating system, as opposed to virtual box which does not. :(

So, I have been able to install the server edition inside the vmware machine. I have never used nfs before, but the tutorial I was following was suggesting to use it.

http://www.pythian.com/blogs/654/installing-oracle-11g-on-ubuntu-linux-710-gutsy-gibbon

However, I am having problems with -

1. Trying to expand the virtual hard disk inside vmware. I tried it, but havent succeeded yet.
2. The Oracle installer exits with a strange error message.

I have posted my issues on the ubuntu forums, and havent got any solution yet. Lets see how it goes...

vmware 2 beta on hardy

I installed vmware 2 beta on my hardy. It was a surprise and a pleasant one at that, the installation procedure did not require any tweaks at all. It worked out of the box.

Further, when I tried to connect to the web based management interface, I encountered my first problem. vmware requires a log-in with root user, and as any ubuntu user would tell you, the root user is well-hidden in ubuntu. Almost never used, my knowledge on how to set a password to root user was zero.

Again, communities came to help. This thread on vmware communities helped me through that.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/901283#901283

Its a small tip, but none-the-less important. Just run "sudo gnome-terminal" and it would open a root terminal for you. Once there, type "passwd" to change the password for root user and you are done.

now, in the browser, log in to vmware web mgmt interface with user as root, and password you chose for root user.

As a precaution, I gave my normal user admin privileges so that I dont have to login as root all the time.

xgl - System monitor bug in hardy...

On Ubuntu's latest release, Hardy Heron, if you are using xserver-xgl package for graphics, you are in for a surprise.

The system monitor carries on a bug in xgl package wrt incorrect reporting of memory usage, and shows processes using zillion bytes of memory.

I started using xserver-xgl from the times in Gutsy when Compiz would not run on my hardware without that. However, I didnt quite notice this until I involved myself with beta release of hardy.

As it happened, I raised this issue on the Ubuntu forums (more than once actually, link-1, link-2), and finally after a few discussions/posts, it was discovered that

• xserver-xgl has a few bugs
• no more active development is happening on this stream of packages
• Compiz should work without needing this package as well.

As a result, I tried removing xgl from my laptop, and voila, memory consumption numbers are from earth again.. the martian numbers have left... :)

Attaching two screenshots here to give the idea of the Martian numbers...

acid3 and webkit on hardy

I have been fascinated with the rendering of web pages by Safari. Always liked it, it has a certain edge to it when talking about the look and feel. When I read more, it turned out that the rendering engine is similar to Konqueror (somewhere I read that its actually based on open source libraries from Konqueror).

I dont have a mac so I cant really experience it first hand, but the windows release of Safari made me get my first experience.

This weekend, I was surfing net when I came across "webkit". Reading a bit more about it informed me -

WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. This website is also the home of S60's S60 WebKit development.

This made me think, if its actually open source to start with, the code must be available and may be I can compile it for my system.

Well, I didnt had to look much further... search produced this link...
http://blog.kagou.fr/post/2008/04/21/Test-Webkit-on-Ubuntu-Gutsy-and-Hardy

However, my first attempt at compilation failed, due to lack of one of the packages. libxt-dev

So, now the list of pacakges that should be installed on hardy to compile webkit would look like this :

sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool bison flex gperf libicu-dev libxslt-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libsqlite3-dev libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libgtk2.0-dev build-essential libxt-dev

The sample browser, gives me 98 on acid3 (acid3.acidtests.org). Though very minimalistic in capabilities, this is the best score for acid3 that I could get on my system.

Here are my scores
Firefox 3 beta 5 : 71
Flock : 51
Opera 9.5 beta 2 : 78
Midori (webkit based) : 64
Webkit minimal browser (nightly build r32862 ) 98

On my windows partition as well, none of the browsers went beyong 70's. Best being opera at 71.

making vmware work on hardy..

Had trouble originally making vmware work on my new hardy 64 bit system (behaves almost same on desktop and server variants).

Careful looking up found out two things,

• the new beta version (2) of vmware works from web based console, and could take quite some time making it work
• vmware on hardy 64 bit requires some tweaking to do before you can really get up and running with it.

Finally managed to get through with help from ubuntuforums.org. Nice fellow has posted his experience with 64 bit version, and it turned out to work exactly the same way for me...

Loads of thanks :) to http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4357442&postcount=10

Experiments With Hardy...

Ubuntu is by far the more stable of the OS's.. nothing new about that.

Last friday the release candidate of the new Hardy came out. It was beta for sometime now, and I had it for a few days in beta phase too..

It was my first time playing around with an OS in its beta stage and sure.. it feels good to be involved..

I found a few things, suggested on the forums, put out bug reports and it all works so nicely. Everybody involved is so open and helping... it was actually very nice exp. A good learning curve as well for a few things... :)

Currently there are a few things still going on with the "Hardy Release Candidate" with differing opinions, but all in all it looks like a good package to me. On my laptop, it works nicely, no issues as such...

In my view, the Ubuntu series has had its share of issues with hardware compatibility. With different people using different set of hardware, it turns out that not everything is 100% picked up by the installer as it should be.

I tried using virtualbox on hardy to install another copy of hardy 64 bit to experiment something, however, virtualbox wont allow that !! People on the ubuntu forums suggest that it could be a "feature" of vbox not to support 64bit cpu as of now... That would be a shame, actually... :(

Checking out vmware has been another shock. Earlier it used to be "FREE" for Linux, however now its only 30day evaluation version. Sounds like just another corporate, not a company supporting open source...

On the 64 bit point, I am really thinking of going 64 bit completely... all out... I have tried it for a few weeks now, and for me its been no problems at all... and the support for packages etc is fine for my needs... Yeah, some more programs need to be compiled by hand, but thats ok for me... :)

Get rid of the Ubuntu splash screen during boot

If you want to see Ubuntu booting like the good old text based linux systems, here are some ideas on removing the splash screen from the booting process....

Quickzi: Get rid of the Ubuntu splash screen during boot

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Hardy 64bit beta Installed...

This weekend I installed Hardy 64 bit on my Core2Duo notebook and it flew... Just like that.

Earlier when I had gutsy for the first time on this laptop, I had plenty of issues with my hardware. Tweak here and tweak there, I had to do a lot of things to make it work the right way.

However, with Hardy this time, I would say, I felt happy for two reasons.. first it didnt complain about any of my hardware (probably because now my hardware is about a year old, and for gutsy it was so much newer..) and that its 64 bit installation.

I am yet to completely switch to this, especially since I encountered a bug with evolution and that Hardy is still beta, but I do see a way forward going with this version of Ubuntu for me.

As a result of this experiment, right now, I am triple booting, Vista business, Gutsy (32 bit) and Hardy (64 bit).

This is one thing I like so much about the PC notebooks, you can play around with them a lot more than you can do with an equivalent mac... :)

One of the guys on ubuntu forums posted this url for a better understanding of 64 bit systems... 64 bit Systems have more benefits than RAM only


Later on, I found this link, a very interesting collection of 32bit vs 64bit OS (especially Ubuntu) comparison.