Foehn & Hirsch laptop and Linux

March 27th, 2010 Matt

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”

Then, it arrived, and things started to go badly wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in General Computing, Non-Oracle, Personal | 7 Comments »

Tom Kyte on How to Ask for Help

March 21st, 2010 Matt

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:

Posted in General Computing, Non-Oracle | 1 Comment »

Installing SQL Developer on Linux

March 3rd, 2010 Matt

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.

Posted in Oracle, Technical | 4 Comments »