Been doing some computer hacking

A couple weeks ago, I got a new laptop for work and I have spent time at work (and at home) getting it correctly configured. It came installed with Vista, but I like to do most development in Linux. So after spending a week getting a development environment installed on Vista (both Java and C++), I started the process of getting Fedora 8 installed. This involved shrinking a Volume on Vista which freed up about 40GB (out of 160GB). After downloading the ISO image for Fedora and having it burned to DVD, I installed it on the empty space to create a dual boot machine. There was an issue with the Grub loader, so Vista didn't boot. But working with Joe (from TIE), we played around and discovered that the Fedora install had the wrong drive partition as the Vista boot drive (hd2 was correct, not hd1).

Since I want access to both Vista and Linux at the same time, I knew that I need to install VMware. I was hoping to have a native boot to Fedora and run Vista inside a Virtual Machine; however, Fedora wasn't recognizing the wireless network at home and I had issues getting the 'dual' head monitor to work. So I downloaded an eval copy of VMWare workstation and am running Fedora as a virtual machine.

For development on Linux, we use an Oracle Database. Although I could connect with an Oracle Server at TIE, I wanted to create a local instance of Oracle on the laptop's Linux. I first attempted 'Oracle Express' - this appeared to install, but I couldn't get things to work. So I downloaded the 700MB tar file from the Oracle Technology Network and installed the 'Enterprise' edition. I have installed Oracle before, but it has been many years. This was not trivial, but I was able (eventually) able to solve all the issues. Here's a brief recap:

• The Oracle installer is a Java application in which Oracle supplies its own JRE (1.4). It initially failed from the get-go 'cause it couldn't find a shared library. Some initial searches said to install the x-11 'deprecated' libraries. This didn't work. Finally, I ran across some information about using 'YUM' to install the specific missing library. That worked.
• One the installer started, it complained because I was not running an officially supported version of Linux - again Googling provided the solution - in a 'text' file, replace "Fedora 8" with "Red Hat -4".
• Next up was another issue with the oracle provided JRE - this ended up involving a problem that JRE 1.4 has with 'modern' XWindows servers. The solution? run a 'sed' script to swap something in one of the JRE shared libraries. (This came up again later when I was trying to run some oracle tools).
• At this point, the installer actually came up. I installed it,but there were complaints. I reinstalled, but still had complaints (this was eventually traced to the same JRE shared library problem).
• The biggest issues with Oracle were getting the listener to work - there is still an issue when I am using it at home or off network.
  

I guess the interesting part of all this is that I really haven't done this kind of hacking for a long time. In the mid-nineties I started investigating Linux and Java and spent a lot of off-work hours 'hacking'. However, the last few years I have focused on music in my off hours. This past couple weeks I spent a few more hours at home 'hacking' - it was fun in its way, but a horrific time sink.