Last week, my house was broken into and one of our laptops was stolen. Not too much of a big deal, since there wasn’t much data on there (thank goodness for Cloud computing!), and once the insurance assessor visited, I went out and bought a new machine. Since this was for my wife, I left her using my Toshiba Portege M800 which runs Linux Mint 8 x64, just to see what she thought of it and whether she could move from Vista to Linux.
After a few days of it, she was mightily impressed – there are some nice features of Mint that she liked over Vista, so asked if the replacement could be one that ran Linux. No problems – might be a bit cheaper, after all! – so I hunted down a Foehn & Hirsch laptop on eBuyer.com which was cheap, and came with no OS. Here’s the detailed spec:
Processor
Intel T3000 Celeron Dual Core Processor 1.8Ghz,
1MB Cache
SIS M672 + 968 Graphics Chipset
Memory
4GB DDR2 667MHz
2 x SO DIMM
Expandable to 4GB
Hard Drive
320GB SATA 2.5″
Optical Drive
DVD+/-RW Supermulti
Software
Operating System: No Operating System
Display
15.6” HD TFT
Resolution: 1366 x 768
Graphics
SiS M672 Integrated
Shared Memory Architecture 256MB
High Preference 3D/2D graphic Accelerator
Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Compatible
Super Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0
Audio
High Definition Audio
Compliant With Microsoft UAA
Direct Sound 3D
2 x Built in Speaker
Built in Mic
Input Devices
Multi Language Keyboard
Touchpad with Scroll zone
Networking
56K Fax Modem
Built in 10/100MB Base-TX Ethernet LAN
WLAN: 802.11 b/g
Power Supply
Full Range AC Adapter 65W
AC in 100~240V, 50~60Hz
DC Out 19V, 3.42A / 18.5V, 3.5A
6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
up to 2.5 hour battery life
Dimensions
Width 374mm
Depth 256mm
Height 25~37mm
Weight 2.7kg
Interfaces
3 x USB 2.0 ports
1 x VGA port
1 x Headphone port
1 x Microphone port
1 x S/PDIF output port
1 x RJ-11 port
1 x RJ45 LAN port
1 x DC-in jack
Expansion
7 in 1 Card Reader (MMC / RSMMC / SD / Mini SD / MS / MS Pro / MS Duo)
1 x Express Card Slot
Warranty / Miscellaneous
1 Year Manufacturer Warranty
1.3mp Webcam
That should be fine, I thought – keep her in laptops for a while, good spec and should be fine for Linux. There was nothing anywhere that I could find that said otherwise, apart from a line that said “Please note that this Laptops does not have an Operating System installed, Ebuyer recommends Genuine Microsoft Software”
I’ve just been asked a question which seems to fit the classic Tom Kyte “my car won’t start” scenario – a few pieces of information (which are of relevance to the asker, who has been looking at it for a while) but there is nothing there that provides any information about what the problem actually is.
Here’s a video from ZD Net Australia – it’s an interview with Tom about how developers should ask for help:
I recently had to install SQL Developer on my Linux box at home to communicate with my R12.1.1 instance. I could have used the version that I have installed in my W2K virtual machine (I need some kind of Windows installed to use Workflow Builder, so have a VM running it), but sometimes I just need to access the database without wanting or needing to have a VM running which uses 1GB of RAM. In this post, I will detail the steps that I took to get it working.
Firstly, download the right version from Oracle here. I downloaded the file “sqldeveloper-2.1.1.64.39-no-jre.zip”
Once the program has downloaded, unzip the file into a temporary location. I unzipped mine into /home/Downloads where it created a new subdirectory called “sqldeveloper” for me.
Move the sqldeveloper folder into /opt (you may need root privileges to do this, so either do this as root or use sudo to move the folder).
Navigate to /opt/sqldeveloper and change the privileges on the sqldeveloper.sh file using chmod:
sudo chmod 755 sqldeveloper.sh
Create a new file called “sqldeveloper” in /usr/local/bin/sqldeveloper which contains the following line:
/opt/sqldeveloper/sqldeveloper.sh
Change the permissions on this new file using chmod again:
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/sqldeveloper
Finally, you can run the program just by typing “sqldeveloper” at the command prompt window. Run this now from a terminal window, and you will be prompted to confirm the location of the JDK:
Oracle SQL Developer
Copyright (c) 1997, 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates.All rights reserved.
Type the full pathname of a J2SE installation (or Ctrl-C to quit), the path
will be stored in ~/.sqldeveloper/jdk
In my instance, the JVM is located at /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun so enter that path and SQL Developer should start. Because the path to ~/.sqldeveloper does not exist yet (it will be created the first time the program runs), you will see errors. Close SQL Developer down and run the command again – you will be prompted to enter the path a second time, which will then be saved to ~/.sqldeveloper/jdk. If you ever change the location of the JVM, you will need to modify this file or SQL Developer will fail.
The last thing that I did was to create a new shortcut in my Ubuntu menu – if you are doing this, then the icon file can be found at /opt/sqldeveloper/icon.png. Now when I click on the icon, SQL Developer starts fine:
Update 01-FEB-2011 @ 0822: Just a quick update to say that although I’ve not tested this on many Linux distros, I’ve moved away from Ubuntu to Linux Mint with no problems.
