Fedora 18 and Oracle 11gR2…

 

After several abortive attempts I finally got hold of Fedora 18 last night. Those mirrors are getting a real battering at the moment. 🙂

The first job was to do a basic installation.

I’d seen a few things written about the new installer, not all of which were positive. IMHO the installation was a really nice experience. It is very different to previous installers, which probably freaks some people out, but I think it works really well.

Once the installation is complete it’s pretty much business as usual. You’ve got newer versions of most of the packages, but to be honest I don’t really focus to much on that. I just keep doing “yum update” every few days and work with what I’ve got. 🙂

One thing that did take me by surprise is how much a hated GNOME Shell. I’ve written several times in that past that I thought it was OK. It was my default environment for quite a few months, but after spending an extended period on XFCE at home and Windows XP at work, I can safely say that I seriously don’t get GNOME Shell. Fortunately, Fedora 18 comes with a whole host of window managers including GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Cinnamon and MATE, so I’m sure you’ll find something there that you can work with.

The next job was to see if Oracle would install on it.

Every time I do this I think to myself it’s going to be the last time. It’s far more sensible to use a VM and install the database on a supported distro. Oracle Linux is free and a supported platform, so messing around with installs on a non-supported distro, like Fedora, really doesn’t make sense. Maybe this will actually be the last time. 🙂

So what next? I’ve got some physical servers running Fedora 17 as the host OS which will have to be upgraded. I think I’m going to play around with Cinnamon and MATE before I do that. If they don’t work for me it’s back to plain and simple XFCE for my window manager. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.