Tag: Linux

WebCams, Linux and Windows…

With the recent departure of one of my friends for New Zealand, I thought it was about time I got into using Skype. I’ve had it installed on my CentOS machine at home for some time, but only have one friend who uses it, so it’s not really been a big thing for me.

Until yesterday, I used a dodgy old microphone and my PC speakers, but I thought I’d nip down to Rip-off World (PC World) and buy a headset to make it more convenient. Whilst shopping, I decided to buy a cheap and crappy headset and webcam package, allowing me to make video calls… Or so I thought.

It turns out support from webcams on Linux is really crappy. I quick search on the net shows there are several projects that produce drivers to support an assortment of webcams, but there are none that support my hardware. Added to that, the latest version of Skype doesn’t include the beta video call functionality under Linux.

I guess I should have expected it really. There is little reason for manufacturuers to write Linux drivers for their kit when the demand is so low, but until they do using Linux on a home desktop has some limitations.

I’m going to stick with CentOS on my main machine. It serves me well and it’s free, so I can’t complain. I’m planning on buying a new laptop in the next few weeks/months. I had half a mind to install Linux on it, but maybe I will stick with the preinstalled copy of Windows Vista after all…

Cheers

Tim…

FC6 Draft Articles…

I’ve written a couple of draft installation articles for DB10g R2 and AS10g R3 on Fedora Core 6 (Test 2).

I’ll revisit the articles once the final version of FC6 is released. I’m hoping the warning at the start of the articles prevents a repeat of the FC5 incident. 🙂

As expected, FC6 has diverged even further from RHEL4. There are a bunch of packages that either don’t exist or are deprecated. The software seems to work OK, but I’m not sure how many problems are waiting in the wings. It will be interesting to see how Oracle and RHEL5 get on together, especially where RAC is concerned.

Cheers

Tim…

SUSE doesn’t rock my world…

I installed SUSE Linux for the first time at the weekend and I was suprised at how unimpressed I was. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with it, I just expected a lot more after the good press it’s had over the years.

Back in the days when I first started playing with Linux (Red Hat 5.2), you couldn’t download the SUSE installation CDs for free, so I started to use Red Hat Linux and have pretty much stuck with it (RHEL, Fedora & CentOS) ever since. I’ve played briefly with other distributions (like Debian, Mandrake, Slackware and Ubuntu etc.) but never seen anything worth making me switch.

During a fit of idle curiosity I downloaded SUSE Linux 10.1 and installed it. Two things people often mention about SUSE are the great hardware detection and the ease of installation. I’ve never had a problem with the hardware detection using Red Hat, so I’m not in a position to comment on that, but the installation process doesn’t seem that wonderful to me. Once again, that’s not to say there is anything wrong with it, I just expected something neater and simpler than Anaconda, but what I got looked a little messier and certainly not simpler to use.

Once it was installed it was just like every other distribution, but with a different theme. Nothing to deal a knockout blow to any other distribution I’ve used.

In conclusion, I thought I would experience something better than a Red Hat offering, but I was left feeling rather apathetic about SUSE. If it was the market leader I would use it without any major complaints, but since it’s not I guess I will stick to a Red Hat clone until a new market leader is born.

Cheers

Tim…

OCFS2…

I’m nearing the end of my “I wonder what RAC is like on other platforms?” phase. I ran through a basic setup of a cluster file system using OCFS2, just to prove it worked:

OCFS2 On Linux

As I say in the article, the only reason to use it as far as I can see is to provide a shared location or UTL_FILE and external table operations. I can’t see the point in using it for the OCR location or voting disk as raw devices work fine and it’s not recommended for sharing datafiles…

I guess it’s nice to know it’s there if I ever need it 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

ASM with ASMLib or Raw Devices?

I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s better to run ASM on Linux using ASMLib or raw devices. Some of the Oracle documentation claims ASMLib gives better performance that raw devices with 10g Release 2, while other sources claim it only affects candidate disk discovery time…

Whilst setting up a test I wrote this article:

ASM using ASMLib and Raw Devices

I’m sure the configuration information will be useful to others, but my first performance test only convinced me that using VMware on my kit at home is pointless for performance tests. You don’t say!!! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

FC5 Update… Again…

Over the last few weeks I’ve received lots of comments relating to the Oracle 10gR2 on FC5 issue. Recently, most of these have been people commenting on the success of the installation. As a result, I revisited the article based on all the comments and made the following changes:

  • There was a typo on my amendment on the gennttab script. It’s now corrected.
  • I originally used the source rather than the binary of the openmotif21 package. I now use the binary.
  • I was originally installing from an early download of 10gR2, the one that extracts to give a “./db/Disk1/runInstaller” structure. I downloaded a later release that extracts to “./database/runInstaller”. I now use this later release.

I ran through the installation again this morning and it worked perfectly. I don’t know which of the three changes made the difference and to be totally frank, I don’t care. So as it stands, the installation works fine and I hope this is the last time I’ll have to use FC5.

Thanks to everyone who helped in the production of the final article. All your comments were appreciated. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. The document has been released, so it is now listed as a new article. You gotta laugh 🙂