Category: Linux

Fedora 24 and Oracle 12c

fedoraFedora 24 was released a few days ago. As usual I had a play around with it and tried installing Oracle on it.

First comes the warnings, because people keep misunderstand why I do this. Do not install Oracle on Fedora before reading this!

With that out of the way, here’s what I did.

No real drama here. It was pretty much the same as Fedora 23 in that respect.

It’s kind-of hard to get excited about a new version of Fedora since I switched my desktop from Fedora to Mac. One thing that was interesting is the change to the upgrade process. In previous releases I used “fedup” to do it. Now it’s pretty much done using DNF (YUM). If you are interested, you can read about it here.

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 22/23 and Oracle 11gR2/12cR1

linux-tuxAs always, installations of Oracle server products on Fedora are not a great idea, as explained here.

I was reading some stuff about the Fedora 23 Alpha and realised Fedora 22 had passed me by. Not sure how I missed that. 🙂

Anyway, I did a run through of the usual play stuff.

While I was at it, I thought I would get the heads-up on Fedora 23 Alpha.

The F23 stuff will have to be revised once the final version is out, but I’m less likely to forget now. 🙂

I guess the only change in F22 upward that really affects me is the deprecation of YUM in F22 in favour of the DNF fork. For the most part, you just switch the command.

#This:
yum install my-package -y
yum groupinstall my-package-group -y
yum update -y

#Becomes:
dnf install my-package -y
dnf groupinstall  my-package-group -y
dnf group install  my-package-group -y
dnf update -y

This did cause one really annoying problem in F23 though. The “MATE Desktop” had a single documentation package that was causing a problem. Usually I would use the following.

yum groupinstall "MATE Desktop" -y --skip-broken

Unfortunately, DNF doesn’t support “–skip-broken”, so I was left to either manually install the pieces, or give up. I chose the latter and use LXDE instead. 🙂 F23 is an Alpha, so you expect issues, but DNF has been in since F22 and still no “–skip-broken”, which I find myself using a lot. Pity.

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 21 : Upgrading from Fedora 20

I just did an upgrade of my old desktop from Fedora 20 to Fedora 21. The process was similar to this old blog post, but there were some variations, so I’ll list the procedure here.

  • Update your current Fedora 20 system by issuing the “yum update -y” command and restart once it is complete.
  • Install the latest “fedup” package using “sudo yum –enablerepo=updates-testing install fedup”
  • Run the “sudo fedup-cli –network 21 –product=nonproduct” command.
  • If you are using Dropbox, disable the repository using the “yum-config-manager –disable Dropbox” command. Re-enable it once the Fedora 21 repository is available.
  • Run the following clean up commands.
    sudo rpm --rebuilddb
sudo yum distro-sync --setopt=deltarpm=0

sudo yum install rpmconf
sudo rpmconf -a
  • If you are using Chrome, uninstall and reinstall Chrome.

It seemed to go fine!

Cheers

Tim…

I must install Oracle on Fedora!

Followers of my blog and website know I play around with installations on Fedora for fun. All of my installation guides on Fedora come with a link at the top that points to this disclaimer.

A few times recently I’ve been contacted by people saying their boss, teacher or customer is insisting they install Oracle on Fedora. Rather than repeat myself, I’ve added another point at the bottom of this disclaimer that reads:

Q: My boss/teacher/customer is insisting that I should install Oracle on Fedora. What should I say to them?
A: Your boss/teacher/customer is making a mistake, probably because they do not understand the implications of what they are asking you to do, or do not know about the free alternatives. You should probably get them to read this Oracle Linux FAQ. If they are still unsure, feel free to put them into contact with me and I will happily educate them.

If you are being asked to do something that is blatantly incorrect, it is your responsibility to educate those around you so they can (hopefully) make better choices in future.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle 11gR2 and 12cR1 on Oracle Linux 7

I did a quick update of my Oracle installation articles on Oracle Linux 7. The last time I ran through them was with the beta version OL7 and before the release of 12.1.0.2.

The installation process of 11.2.0.4 on the production release of Oracle Linux 7 hasn’t changed since the beta. The installation of 12.1.0.2 on Oracle Linux 7 is a lot neater than the 12.1.0.1 installation. It’s totally problem free for a basic installation.

You can see the articles here.

There is a bold warning on the top of both articles reminding you that the database is not supported on Oracle Linux 7 yet! Please don’t do anything “real” with it until the support is official.

Note. I left the fix-it notes for the 12.1.0.1 installation at the bottom of the 12c article, but now 12.1.0.2 is available from OTN there is really no need for someone to be installing 12.1.0.1 other than for reference I guess.

Cheers

Tim…

 

 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 Released

It feels almost like heresy to discus something that isn’t Oracle-related on the day that Oracle announced the new In-Memory Database Option, but something else was also released today. Red Hat gave birth to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.

I’m a big fan of all things Linux. I’m typing this blog post on a Fedora 20 desktop at home. I’m a rabid fan of Oracle Linux for servers at home and at work. As a result, the birth of RHEL7 is a pretty big deal for me.

I’ve been playing with the Oracle Linux 7 betas for a while (OL7 Install, DB 11gR2 Install, DB 12c Install). I expect we will see the birth of Oracle Linux 7 pretty soon, which is where it gets really interesting for me.

I’m sure it’s going to take quite a long time for Oracle to start supporting their products on RHEL7/OL7, but this is the future, so you’ve for to get your skates on! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

RHEL7 and Oracle Linux 7 beta

Nearly two weeks ago, Oracle announced the Oracle Linux 7 Beta 1. Being the Linux fanboy I am, I downloaded it straight away from here.

Oracle Linux is a clone of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. The RHEL7 beta, and therefore OL7 beta, distro is based on a cut of Fedora 19, although depending on who you ask, it’s possibly more a mix of Fedora 18, 19 and 20… Suffice to say, there are a lot of changes compared to the RHEL6/OL6 distribution.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, my desktop at home is running Fedora 20, so I’m pretty used to most of the changes, but I’ve not written much about them, apart from the odd blog post. It’s not a high priority for me, since I’m not a sysadmin, but I’ll be updating/rewriting a few of the Linux articles on the site to include the new stuff.

When Surachart Opun mentioned having to look at systemd and firewalld, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to update my firewall and services articles. You can see the new versions here.

RHEL7/OL7 is only in beta, and even after the production release I’m sure it will be a long time before Oracle actually certify any products against it, but if you are not a Fedora user, it’s probably worth you having a play around with this stuff.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Linux and MySQL

I’m in the process of taking on some of the MySQL databases in my company. The first ones are MySQL 4.1 running on Windows, so we are upgrading them to MySQL 5.6 on Oracle Linux. As with many of our systems, these will be running on VMware virtual machines.

Since the current installations are so old, we are planning on dumping out the data and creating fresh installations on the new systems. Based on the advice I got from Ronald Bradford and Sheeri Cabral, we are also taking this opportunity to switch to InnoDB and utf8, rather than MyISAM and latin1 that are currently used.

We are using the MySQL yum repository for the installation, so we can be on the latest MySQL version, rather than that shipped as part of Oracle Linux (or RHEL) 6.5. The other neat thing about this is it takes care of point release upgrades as part of the “yum update” process.

So far all my testing has been done on VMs running on my PC, but we are soon going to start rolling this out. It should be an interesting piece of work. The developers are doing a bunch of testing with InnoDB and utf8 to see what issues we come up against…

Cheers

Tim…

Update. For those new to MySQL, you might like to read this post by Patrick Hurley.