Web developer musings… and then some.

Since my previous post, I’ve used:

• MEPIS 8; KDE 3, based on Debian 5;
• Ubuntu 9.04;  GNOME 2, based on Debian 5;
• Linux Mint 7: GNOME 2, based on Ubuntu 9.04;
• Kubuntu 8.04; KDE 3, based on on Ubuntu 8.04.

I’ve compared MEPIS 8 and Ubuntu 9.04, in what was called an unfair comparison by some. I think some of the commenters even indicated that Ubuntu 9.04 would’ve come up tops, but I begged (and still do) to differ.

Since then, I’ve used Mint 7 and Kubuntu 8.04, which one may realize are using GNOME 2 and KDE 3 as well. So I guess a more appropriate comparison would’ve been:

• MEPIS 8 versus Kubuntu 8.04;
• Ubuntu 9.04 versus Linux Mint 7.

All of packages I use (e.g. php-pear, imagemagick, mysql-server) have the same names across the four distributions (but that’s probably due to Debian).

All four distributions work fine w/ Oracle Express Edition, which is a great way to try out Oracle database if you don’t happen to work for a large corporation that uses its (probably too-)expensive licenses.

I must say that it wasn’t so much the particular distribution, source distribution or version number that affected the speed of the interface, but rather, the window manager.

GNOME 2 just seems… slow. KDE 3 is well… snappy.

To me, there is no discernable difference between MEPIS and Kubuntu — both use KDE 3, except perhaps Kubuntu uses Adept whilst MEPIS sticks to good old Synaptic. Both are great applications nonetheless.

I’ll gripe about the loss of Dropbox, which is available both Ubuntu and Mint due to GNOME. Apparently there is command-line instructions available. But I digress.

On the upside, I can’t seem to (easily) setup a network printer in either MEPIS or Kubuntu. I followed the instructions on the Ubuntu website, and voila, I could print. Likewise for Mint, which is basically Ubuntu nicely themed. Or maybe I’m just scratching the surface.

Kdesvn and Meld are almost interchangeable, unless you want to view svn logs of course (use the former).

So there you have it. If you’ve got a high-performance, dual- (or quad-) core laptop, Ubuntu or Mint will do fine. But if you’ve got a 2- to 3- year old laptop, consider Kubuntu 8.04 or MEPIS 8. Unfortunately, I can’t access mepis.org anymore — the site is down, why? — and Canonical maintains fast servers, so I’ll be using Kubuntu for the forseeable future.

I found this link useful. It helped me to get Java running in Firefox. The instructions are a bit outdated, so I thought to repost.

First we need Java installed:

apt-get install sun-java6-plugin

We go to the Firefox “plugins” folder, and rename for the existing (not working!) plugin with a .bak extension, and then create a symlink to the (hopefully working!) plugin:

cd /usr/lib/firefox/plugins
mv libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so.bak
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so libjavaplugin.so

You’ll need to restart Firefox for the changes to take effect. Hope this helps!

I received the following error in my CodeIgniter web application today:

Notice: Use of undefined constant OCI_COMMIT_ON_SUCCESS – assumed ‘OCI_COMMIT_ON_SUCCESS’ in …

today. It turns out that, in MEPIS at least, you need the packages bc, libaio, even if you’ve compiled support for oci8. I re-added the packages, restarted Apache and it worked, once again.

I previously wrote that MEPIS worked (sound, wired networking, wireless networking) out of the box for my IBM R52. FYI, the wireless card is the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG. I’d also previously detailed instructions on Debian “Etch”. What I didn’t state was that I would encounter issues where wlassistant would report that it was unable to get an IP address (via DHCP) whilst attempting to connect to a standard WEP router. However if I left wlassistant switched on for awhile, it would (mysteriously) work later on. I got fedup, and mostly used a wired connection thereafter.

I’m pleased to note that there are no such issues for my Fujitsu Lifebook S7110, which uses the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG:

lspci -nn | grep 3945
05:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection [8086:4222] (rev 02)

When I booted up via the LiveCD, I feared the worst, as it was unable to connect to the (same) router. But go ahead and install nonetheless. On the first boot after install, I configured the network, to no avail. I rebooted however, and it worked fine. I’m still not sure what’s going on here, but it’s certainly a pleasant surprise.

For a time I feared that my laptop would reach it’s end of useful life before I found a distro as excellent as MEPIS, but that’s all in the past now.

This post helped me install Oracle XE on my developer machine successfully!

It worked for my Debian Lenny system previously, and now it’s tested to work with MEPIS 8.0, Ubuntu 9.04 and Linux Mint 7 as well.

1. Oracle Express Edition
This step is optional if you already have a server to use, but my inexperience it’s far better to have one local.

First you need to add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.lst:

deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

Then run the following commands:

su
wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle -O- | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get install oracle-xe

It’s a big .deb file, 210.4MB to be exact. The installation, like most in Debian systems is a breeze. When the installer completes there is one extra step:

su
/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure

You’ll be asked to create a system/sys (administrative user) password, and whether or not to start Oracle on boot.

2. oci8 static object
With oracle-xe successfully installed, we’ll focus on getting Oracle and PHP to place nice.

I downloaded the RPM versions of these files from here:

oracle-instantclient11.1-basic-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient11.1-devel-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient11.1-jdbc-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient11.1-odbc-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient11.1-sqlplus-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient11.1-tools-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm

I’m sure that not all of the RPMs are required, so maybe you can try just basic, devel if you like. No guarantees, though.

I also converted it to deb using alien (which you may not have, but can install using ’sudo apt-get install alien’, and then installed:

sudo alien oracle*.rpm
sudo dpkg -i oracle*.deb

You need to log in to your oracle.com account and accept the software license.

You’ll need the ‘pecl’ command, which is available in php-pear, php5-dev:

sudo apt-get install php-pear php5-dev
sudo pecl install oci8

Input “1″ and hit Enter, then type (or paste) the following text.

instantclient,/usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib

When you’re done, hit Enter twice to begin compilation. It takes awhile.

You’ll need to add one line to the end of your php.ini file:

sudo pico /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Page Down to the bottom, then add “extension=oci8.so”, and then Ctrl + X, Y to save. Repeat for the cli version too, found in /etc/php5/cli/php.ini.

Lastly, restart Apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

My slow laptop is now running on SimplyMEPIS 8.0. Surprisingly, it doesn’t feel that slow anymore. Maybe it was an OS issue, but I digress.

The install process was a breeze. I used mepis-network to setup wireless access, gparted to partition the hard disk into two partitions of 8GB (root) and 2GB (swap) each, and then it installed by itself. Later, it setup grub for me so that if I wanted to boot into Windows, it would comply. But I won’t of course. When I boot into MEPIS for the first time, I wanted to setup wireless again, since the install was a Live CD. But I didn’t even need to perform that step! The network settings that I added during the Live CD boot had been saved! Voila!

IMO networking, particularly wireless networking has to improve significantly, even Lenny. I wish it would just work, rather than having to jump through hoops, and even then, not work particularly well.

Up till now, I cannot connect to my home wireless router. Before Lenny was released, there was a tool called “wlassistant” that worked occasionally. But now it’s gone, and all of the other tools (kwifi-radar, wireless-tools) do not work. And it’s not a router issue, because my other Windows laptops connect easily.

I’ll try to set this up as a development machine; if things go well I just might switch my (primary) laptop to MEPIS.

This is probably related to an incompatibility between the motherboard/sound card and MEPIS 6.5.

$ lspci | grep 'ICH7'
0000:00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
0000:00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
0000:00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller AHCI (rev 02)
0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)

What we are looking for is the Intel ‘High Definition Audio Controller’ (first output line), or HDA.

$ su
# cat /etc/modprobe.d/snd_hda_intel
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=2
options snd-hda-intel model=auto

Switch to root, and then use your favorite text editor to comment out the two output lines above; e.g.

options snd-hda-intel position_fix=2
options snd-hda-intel model=auto

Save and reboot. Audio should be working now. It worked for me!

Once again I was saved by Google (and MEPISlovers forum).

I finally got down to (re)setting up MEPIS on my sister’s laptop since performing my own install of Ruby/Rubygems previously.

I was ignorant to the beauty of apt, aptitude and synaptics. But I digress. It took 35 minutes from clicking the “MEPIS install” icon to seeing the new bootup screen. Not too bad! Of course the dialogs are a real walk in the park, the installer sets up practically everything nicely for you.

Once installed, I proceeded to setup the wireless connection, and I must say. The new MEPIS Network Assistant is a real joy to use. It’s a big improvement over the previous, and it even supports WPA! I didn’t test this though.

6.5 has practically everything a regular user could want. Firefox 2, OpenOffice, KSudoku, the GIMP, KSnapshot, Gaim (now Pidgin), Kate, KPDF (which works better than Adobe Acrobat Reader) and Ark. There’s probably a whole host of software that I missed out.

Of course there could be things like Katapult and SuperKaramba, but then I guess, I’m being picky. This is a great release. It even has the Live CD feature so you can boot it up to explore, make sure your hardware is detected correctly — it probably is, or would be, anyway. MEPIS has great hardware detection/support.

OK rave out.

Would you believe it? This is the first time I’m using Firefox 2 on a Linux distro.

My previous attempts (in FC6) to use the binary, just untar and gunzip to /usr/local/firefox failed as there was some library missing, can’t remember the error now when I ran:

$ /usr/local/firefox/firefox

MEPIS however was nice. It worked right out of the box, no configuration required.

# whoami
root
# gunzip -dc ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz | tar -xof -
# cd ruby-1.8.5-p12
# ./configure
# make
# make test
# sudo make install
# gunzip -dc rubygems-0.9.2.tgz | tar -xof -
# cd rubygems-0.9.2
# ruby setup.rb
.
.
.
Successfully built RubyGem
Name: sources
Version: 0.0.1
File: sources-0.0.1.gem
Removing old RubyGems RDoc and ri...
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require': no such file to load -- rdoc/rdoc (LoadError)
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require'
from /home/belle/Desktop/rubygems-0.9.2/./post-install.rb:103:in `install_rdoc'
from /home/belle/Desktop/rubygems-0.9.2/./post-install.rb:118:in `try_run_hook'
from setup.rb:584:in `run_hook'
from setup.rb:1322:in `exec_task_traverse'
from setup.rb:1175:in `exec_install'
from setup.rb:894:in `exec_install'
from setup.rb:712:in `invoke'
from setup.rb:681:in `invoke'
from setup.rb:1359

Hmmm. Let’s see what MEPIS is missing. It built perfectly on an unpatched version of FC6 the last time. Its probably got something to do with rdoc:

# apt-get install rdoc
# ruby setup.rb
# apt-get install libyaml-ruby
# apt-get install libzlib-ruby
# gem install rails

There’s probably more; e.g. activerecord and all but that’s enough for today. I shall get Subversion up and running soon too, so this can become my development platform.

Adapted from railsforum.com.