This week aside from tons of different tasks I was working on one of MMM users complaint regarding some issues with MMM on Solaris 10. I knew that this OS has not so user (admin) friendly environment (especially for people with strong GNU-related background), but had no other options and decided to install Solaris 10 in VMWare Fusion on my desktop.
Installation was a bit strange comparing to Debian/RHEL/Ubuntu and FreeBSD where I have a strong experience, but I’ve managed to install it successfully. The major problem after my first boot was a lack of knowledge about how things could be done in Solaris… Below I’ll describe what generic Linux admin could do with Solaris to make it easier to use and more friendly for GNU-addicted mind 
Notice: If you’re Solaris administrator, please, don’t read further because I’m pretty sure that all these suggestions would look dumb for you (I knew some old solaris admins before and they hated GNU environments).
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Sometimes, especially if you have switched from some another GNU/Linux distribution to Debian GNU/Linux, your will have one major problem: you are missing some software available in your previous distribution. That is were Debian unofficial repositories can help you.
In this post I want to describe the most popular unofficial repositories with set of useful packages for my favorite Linux distribution – Debian .
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I really like Debian and Debian-based Linux distributions. That is because I am admin and I am lazy as all good system administrators With apt-get based distributions I can install/update/deinstall system packages very fast and my work becomes very efficient (there is no rpm-hell or constant building of new software or software updates).
Today I dugg very useful primer for apt-get/dpkg users. It contains many real-life examples of work with apt-get and dpkg utilities and may be interesting for new debian administrators.
Few days ago Oracle Database Express Edition has been released.
Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that’s free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer. Oracle Database XE is a great starter database for:
- Developers working on PHP, Java, .NET, and Open Source applications
- DBAs who need a free, starter database for training and deployment
- Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and hardware vendors who want a starter database to distribute free of charge
- Educational institutions and students who need a free database for their curriculum
I have spent some time for installing it on Debian Sarge because it has only Debian Unstable support and many people does not know, that required lib (libaio) can be installed to Sarge. Now, I will describe step-by-step howto about installing Oracle XE on Debian Sarge.
First of all, you do not need to download Oracle XE installation package for Debian from Oracle Express Download Page. You do not need to do it because Oracle has its own debian repository for automated installations.
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