Sunday, January 11, 2004

Linux Notebook Adventures The story about IBM execs challenging folks to move to a Linux desktop and Israel freezing purchases of Microsoft software, coincided with me installing Linux on my PC - I generally work off a notebook but recently got a spare PC at work.  We are a little fortunate here at Oracle  in that there is a group here who build "base desktop images" of different operating systems (maybe not depending if you like building it yourself - as I generally use Linux every now and then (at least until now...), this is a real quickstart).  As OracleAS 9.0.4 is certified on RedHat Advanced Server 3.0, I chose to install that image.  It started out innocently enough ... in about 15 minutes I had a new desktop on my PC.  Nice.  After a little exploring  I found I pretty much I have everything available I need to live happily.  Out of the box I found  OpenOffice 1.1, mail/browsing with Mozilla (though Ximian Evolution was there too), Acrobat 5.0, RealAudio 8, a pretty nice looking desktop in KDE, Gaim for IM (I use AIM, Yahoo and MSN and it seems to hang together across all three, though MSN SSL is causing some grief), Cisco VPN to get into Oracle's internal network, VNC for remote desktop access/support amongst others.   And after a bit of downloading effort, I found the Oracle software I tend to use installs fine - DB, AS and JDev.  Everything was pretty cool and then I had to go home.  Thinking this kind of sucked that I couldn't play with this anymore, the next thing I found myself doing was installing the image on my work notebook.  I did a quick backup of the little that I keep local - the only thing that I don't put on a shared file system is Radio Userland.  I did a quick doublecheck and found to my dismay only one person  in the world, Chris Double, appears to have run Radio Userland under Linux using Wine.  Well if he could, I could too.  Away I went. Thirty minutes later I was the proud owner of a RHAS 3.0 notebook.  Got home and realized I had forgotten one other thing - wireless networking.  Buffalo, my wireless network and card provider, doesn't provide native Linux support but the most cool folks over at LinuxAnt have stepped up to develop some software on top of Buffalo's drivers on Linux. Fifteen minutes and $19 later I was wirelessly hooked up on Linux.  Cool! Next Radio Userland.  I downloaded and installed Wine and then Radio's software, and it appeared to start ok.  Followed Chris's instructions but I am getting a fair number of errors when Radio starts up ... might be because of RHAS 3.0 which seems to be on a later kernel than others out there.  Can't seem to connect to the local Radio web site, so am struggling right now.  Sadly, I have had to move my blog to my home PC which is the last remaining hold out for XP and, as my wife likes to remind me, is her computer :-(  I wonder if there are any Linux clients for Radio out there?  Seems like a few people have asked the question but Userland doesn't appear keen to build it out. I found one other issue that I have since resolved: WebDAV. It took me a while to realize that Konqueror supports WebDAV as a URL type (e.g. webdav://your_webdav_provider_url).  I use WebDAV for two products we use internally for file management at Oracle - Oracle Files (a fileserver living on top of an Oracle Database) and Oracle Portal ( which provides hooks into its content management capabilities via WebDAV amongst many other things).  In Windows XP times I used Windows Explorer's excellent support of WebDAV.  I think I now have an equivalent in Konquerer's support.  Cool again! Other than Radio, everything else is pretty swish.  Simple example from a few minutes ago - was updating a Powerpoint for a presentation on Tuesday and it was about a 10 minute fixup from the Windows version and it was ready to go.  It will be an interesting first week sticking only with Linux for day to day living. comment [] 5:34:10 PM