I was asked to install Oracle 10gR2 on one of the clients new machines. Of course I had trouble installing it, since the OS was CentOS and not one of the certified Oracle platforms. The trouble with installing Oracle x64 on non-supported systems is the relinking process. You always run into libraries that cannot be found, or some other shit that’s still looking for 32-bit software/libraries. In my opinion x64 should be the default and all server software should be backported to x86, but that’s just my opinion.

Thanks to this post I was able get Oracle to install properly, basically because the list of prerequisite packages in Oracle’s installation guide is to short. This list (at least on CentOS 5.4) should do the trick:

binutils-2.17.50.0.6-2.el5
compat-gcc-34-3.4.6-4
compat-gcc-34-c++-3.4.6-4
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-61
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-61(i386)
control-center-2.16.0-14.el5
gcc-4.1.1-52.el5
gcc-c++-4.1.1-52.el5
gdbm-1.8.0-26.2.1
glibc-2.5-12
glibc-common-2.5-12
glibc-devel-2.5-12
glibc-devel-2.5-12(i386)
libgcc-4.1.1-52.el5(i386)
libgcc-4.1.1-52.el5(x86_64)
libgnome-2.16.0-6.el5
libstdc++-devel-3.4.3-22.1
libXp-1.0.0-8.i386
libXp-1.0.0-8.x64
make-3.81-1.1
sysstat-7.0.0-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
util-linux-2.13-0.44.e15.x86_64

You don’t need the exact versions. Just do a “yum install compat-gcc-34″ for instance, and if the installed version is higher, you’re safe.

Today I exchanged the server hardware with the hardware leftover from my desktop upgrade. So the CPU is now a dual 3GHz (AMD 64-bits) instead of a single 1GHz 32-bits processor. And the memory has been expanded from 512MB to 4GB. Response of the weblog and the gallery should be a lot faster.

On the downside, the 80GB IDE disk stopped working, so I need to check what I’m missing now. As far as I know it was the old disk holding the gallery images, but they were moved to the SATA disk some time ago.

To do: upgrade from Ubuntu 32-bits to 64-bits and reconfigure X to use the new videocard (the troublesome ATI, instead of the ancient NVidia V7700 GeForce2 card).

Yesterday I bought a Gigabit switch and a BluRay rewriter. The switch was mainly necessary because of the NAS-disk. Accessing it from several computers via 100Mbit makes the drive feel sluggish. Now on Gbit, it’s a lot faster. Of course the actual read and write times didn’t change, but browsing it and (dis)connecting it is faster.

After my last system upgrade, I found that I still had a PATA DVD-burner and the new motherboard only has 1 PATA connection (for two drives). Since I have two PATA drives in the system, I had to buy another burner. Instead of being el-cheapo and buying one for about 20-25 euro, I bought a BluRay-rewriter. The LG GGW-H20L. It’s not an easy task to play BluRay movies under Ubuntu, but creating them (since I own Nero Linux) is easy. The drive was recognized by Ubuntu and by Nero, and in no time I burned my first (rewritable) disc.

Today I bought new hardware and upgraded my desktop system. The “old” hardware will give my server more room to breathe (it’s an old P3 1GHz with 512MB memory, soon to be replaced by a AMD Athlon 64X2 6000+ with 4GB memory).
To upgrade my system, I replaced my motherboard, as well as the CPU (now a Phenom II 920), the memory (now 8 GByte) and the videocard (now an NVidia GeForce 9800GT by Gigabyte). Apart from the network card not being recognized automatically, the system was up and running after two reboots. The first to enable the network driver, and a second to enable the restricted NVidia driver.
Oh, and I replaced the 360W power supply with a 500W version. It also has a modular cable system, so only the power cords I need are attached, leaving you with less clutter in the case.

The Phenom II has a nice feature (or the motherboard has, I don’t know): you can group the 4 cores to act as one big core (ganged), or you can leave it to the default and have 4 cores (unganged).

Ubuntu now rocks again…!

Right. Yesterday the update manager presented me a kernel(headers) update, so I installed that. It required a reboot, which I just did. “X can only be started in low graphics mode”. WTF?! The last time I had this (see a couple of postings back) I reverted from the non-free ATI driver to the free driver. It meant a little performance loss, but it worked. Now the free ATI driver is not working anymore as well. “Saw a signal 11″ is what it reports, basically saying: you’re fucked in the ass, so you’d better like it.

If I can’t fix this in a reasonable amount of time, this is the last thing Ubuntu does on my machine. What a fuck-up!

Most definitely annoying. F-spot stopped working again. Not sure why. Did a restart and all. This is exactly the thing why I left Windows for what it is, and switched to Linux. Got to kill Bill (for inventing .NET).

Of course, the new ATI driver did not work either. Yes, it installs, yes, it compiles the fglrx module, but trying to insert it still presents an “unable to allocate memory blah-blah” something error.

Naturally the networking did not work after I restarted X with the old config. Network Manager insists on having no active connections, whereas pinging my other systems works like a charm. I took the advice of another frustrated Intrepid user and

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge network-manager

Indeed, the Network Manager Gnome-applet should be classified as “What Was I Thinking?”. I’m starting to wonder if Intrepid shouldn’t be classified the same.

AMD released ATI Catalyst 8.12, that supposedly supports Ubuntu 8.10. I’ll keep you updated, I’m downloading now.

For some reason the Network Manager icon showed I had no network connection until at some point yesterday the network really stopped working. So in the Network Manager I created a wired connection and not only did that bring back my network, it also made f-spot work! Can’t see what the network has to do with f-spot, but I’m happy anyway.

For some other vague reason (I did not install or update anything of that kind) the “Unable to load NLS codepage cp437″ error messages went away. The cifs-mounts are still mounted the same way. *puzzled*

I upgraded from 8.04LTS to 8.10 yesterday, and it has been nothing but trouble ever since. I had to manually get X working (since there are some problems with the ATI driver obviously), f-spot stopped working (some strange X-windows error), CIFS mounts now complain about being unable to load NLS codepage cp437 (and therefore filling up the syslog with several entries every second), and I will probably find more when I progress on using the system.

This SUCKS big time. I know 8.10 is not an LTS version, but it should be a stable version. I beg to differ.

Update: Azureus (now Vuze) has an auto-update bug (downloads 4.0.0.4, installs and restarts, but remains 3.1.1.0, so wants to update again)