Posts Tagged ‘Fedora’

Fedora 12 was released about three weeks or so ago. It’s taken me that long to verify that my GOAL prerequisite installation script works correctly with the new distro. Happily, it does (I needed to make one small adjustment to let the script allow the use of the higher distro version number), so the GOAL download page has been modified accordingly.

I must say, the new Fedora is the first one I’ve ever seen that doesn’t immediately make me want to vomit: the desktop graphics are subdued and subtle, eschewing the balloons, DNA helices and God knows what other nonsense they’ve gone in for in the past. I still wouldn’t pick it as my first distro, however -from the Oracle perspective, for example, it’s the only distro that doesn’t give you the option to switch off SELinux and the firewall as part of the installation process. You have to remember to do that after the installation completes and you’ve performed your first log-in -which is precisely the time you are least likely to remember such niggly details!

Still, Fedora 12 and 64-bit 11g Release 2 work perfectly together, with a completely flawless installation -apart from a list of supposedly missing packages (which aren’t missing at all) which can be dismissed with a click of the ‘Ignore All’ checkbox!

OK, I give in. The flood of emails has persuaded me (I call 28 “a flood”, anyway). So, if you go to the GOAL home page, you’ll find that there is now a GOAL script for 64-bit Fedora 11. Usual rules apply: default installation of the OS, except that you must choose a static IP address, switch off SELinux and disable the firewall (standard Oracle requirements, nothing to do with GOAL per se).

• The 10g Release 2 installation results in an ins_emdb.mk linking error, but it’s ignorable and everything seems to work OK afterwards.
• The 11g Release 1 prerequisites check complains that compat-libstdc++-33.i386 doesn’t exist, but it’s user-verifiable (that is, you can ignore it) because GOAL has already installed compat-libstdc++-33.i586. There are no linking errors.
• The 11g Release 2 prerequisite check complains about various missing packages… but none of them are actually missing, so an ‘Ignore All’ is all that’s required to deal with that. There are no linking errors.

One unique problem I had with Fedora is that it seems to be very aggressive in checking for updates in the background, regardless of what’s happening in the foreground! Thus, having launched GOAL and gotten it to start downloading the various package prerequisites, I was suddenly confronted with a pile of these sorts of errors:

Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit...
 The other application is: PackageKit
 Memory : 152 M RSS (397 MB VSZ)
 Started: Sun Sep 13 11:07:17 2009 - 00:13 ago
 State  : Sleeping, pid: 4852

GOAL can’t download the right software packages if Fedora’s own PackageKit application is busy in the background checking to see what system updates and so on are available. One slow fix to this problem is to wait until everything’s settled down: let PackageKit do it’s thing and be patient before even thinking about running GOAL. But the fix I deployed was, perhaps, a little ‘aggressive’ in its own way: open another terminal, become root, and then kill -9 4852 (or whatever pid is listed in the last line of that error message). Messy, but effective. Another reason I don’t like Fedora, though.

And therefore this is definitely it: no more distros! Ever!! Probably.

Incidentally, it is quite OK to email me, and I’m a little surprised if anyone ever thought differently. That I don’t post to forums, other people’s blogs or give access to my old technical advice articles is a result of the behaviour of a tiny handful of people. My problems with those few individuals (unfortunately, some of the loudest in the Oracle community, though not often the most technically able) don’t mean I’ve become a hermit or blown up my email server. So long as you’re not one of the problem ones, emailing me is just fine… though I don’t do technical support by email!