If you want to install Oracle’s SQL Developer on Ubuntu (or another DEB based system such as Debian) you can do one of the following:
Download the RPM package and install using rpm (not advisable).
Download the RPM package and convert to a DEB package using alien
Download the ZIP file titled “Oracle SQL Developer for other platforms” and manually install
Use the make-sqldeveloper-package to convert the ZIP file into a DEB package
I used the make-sqldeveloper-package, which is available for Debian and Ubuntu and it’s derivatives. However, the man page and the instructions are little unclear on how to use it. You need to download the zip file available at Oracle’s (and not the RPM file nor any of the other packages) and then use the make-sqldeveloper-package to convert it to a DEB which you can then install using the dpkg command.
This is preferable to using rpm or alien as you can more easily manage the package using Debian’s and Ubuntu package management tools, plus it will integrate SQL Developer into Gnome’s Menu System . Plus, when Oracle updates their version you can use make-sqldeveloper-package to create an updated DEB package and easily update the version you have installed. The procedure outlined below works on Ubuntu Karmic and should also work on any Debian version that has the make-sqldeveloper-package.
As the man page states:
This utility will require you to download the “Oracle SQL Developer for other platforms” archive from <http://otn.oracle.com/software/prod‐ucts/sql/> to create the Debian package from.
1. Download the ZIP file from Oracle’s site
You will need to accept Oracle’s license agreement and download the ZIP file, titled “Oracle SQL Developer for other platforms”, from:
The command will create the build directory and remove it when the command finishes. If the command completes successfully you’ll see the following output after a minute or two:
make-sqldeveloper-package: Building sqldeveloper package in "/tmp".
The DEB file will be created in the current directory. In my example I had changed directories to /tmp and that’s where the DEB file will be:
/tmp/sqldeveloper_2.1.0.63.73+0.2.3-1_all.deb
See the man page for more information about the tool:
After installing there should he an entry in Gnome’s menu to start the SQL Developer. It’s located under:
Applications->Programming->SQL Developer
Note: You will need a JVM installed for the tool to run.
Obligatory Screen Shot:
Oracle SQL Developer
Updated September 27th 2010. Added instructions from Miles on installing dos2unix alternative for Ubuntu Lucid. The dos2unix command is not available in Ubuntu Lucid.
On Ubuntu it used to be that ctrl-alt-backspace would kill X (the backend of the various graphical user interfaces on Linux). In an aim to be user friendly this is now disabled by default. This can be a real pain if X locks up, you can’t kill it nor change to a console.
On Debian and Ubuntu you can install the dontzap command which will allow you to kill X:
sudo apt-get install dontzap
Then run dontzap:
sudo dontzap -d
Or you can the following section to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (which is what the dontxzap command does):
I need to know Selenium better, it’s possible that I might consider using it for a project I might be working on (that sounds like it might have some UI bugs/issues/problems): http://seleniumhq.org/
With a great quote, that shows how well the record companies treat their performing artists (that’s sarcasm in case you don’t have a sense of humour). First Radiohead made zip/zilch/nada from EMI sales of digitized versions of their music:
Yorke: In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the Net. And that’s nuts. It’s partly due to the fact that EMI wasn’t giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff …
Yorke: … It’s about whether the music affects you or not. And why would you worry about an artist or a company going after people copying their music if the music itself is not valued?
Then he talks about how the music iteself isn’t valued, but the business processes surrounding the marketing and selling of music:
Byrne: You’re valuing the delivery system as opposed to the relationship and the emotional thing…
Yorke: You’re valuing the company or the interest of the artists rather than the music itself. I don’t know. We’ve always been quite naive. We don’t have any alternative to doing this. It’s the only obvious thing to do.
DebianGNU/Linux 5.0, codenamed Lenny, was recently released. Here’s a round of of articles about the release and why you might want to consider Debian for your infrastructure.
Techworld sums up what this means for companies and highlights new features and security enhancements:
Debian 5.0, known as Lenny, will offer users improved security handling. For example, as an added protection measure, Debian Installer will now apply any security updates before the first boot.
In addition, several security-critical packages have been built with GCC hardening features, and the standard system contains fewer setuid root binaries and fewer open ports. Other new features include support for IPv6, NFS 4, PostgreSQL 8.3.5, MySQL 5.1.30 and 5.0.51a, Samba 3.2.5, PHP 5.2.6, Asterisk 1.4.21.2, Nagios 3.06 and the Xen Hypervisor 3.2.1.
… Debian was proving to be particularly attractive, claiming that Debian was now the Linux distribution with the lowest total cost of ownership.
And Russell Coker mentions that Debian has full Xen support, which will make Xen users happy!
It lists changes made to packages since the currently installed version. Sure that information will be overwhelming on major upgrades, but what is useful even on major upgrades is the capability to parse News files in the same way.
Me? I’m being running a mixture of Debian Stable, Testing, Sid, and Experimental on my Desktop and it runs stable 99% of time. A configuration like that isn’t recommended, as serious breakage can occur. But, this rarely happens, and I’ve Debian enough to know when not to let the package manager remove important packages! On my laptop, a Lenovo T400, I run Ubuntu Linux, see here for why.
Why use Lenny as a codename? All versions of Debian have been named after characters from the film Toy Story. The unstable version is codenamed Sid, and Sid will never be released as Sid breaks things. For a list of the previous names used see Section 6.2 here:
To enable mod_perl with Apache2 on Debian & Ubuntu for all directories served up by Apache2, including user directories such as ~/public_html, add the following lines to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
In a real production environment you probably don’t want to enable this for all directories that Apache2 serves up, but only from those directories you expect to run perl in.
Thanks to this thread on the Ubuntu Forums for the info.
Doesn’t perform badly, I’ve been using it recently with Ruby code, and I like how it colourises the code to make editing code easier, and performs it auto-completion and method lookup (basically all the features you’d expect with a modern IDE).
It’s does’t startup as fast as using Emacs, or vi, but I find the features very handy and very convenient. It doesn’t look bad either. It runs better on my PC at home running Debian Linux than it does on my PC at work running WinXP. This is probably because I’m using a 1.5 JVM on WinXP and a 1.6 JVM on Debian. Running on 1.6 JVM’s means that Netbeans will automatically use anti-aliased fonts if you have anti-aliased fonts enabled (much easier on the eyes if your using a LCD screen).
I figured it’s time for me to try and install kde4 again! Previously I had to remove KDE4 due to package conflicts. There are installation instructions at:
So following the instructions there on what changes to make to your sources.list, and then run:
aptitude update
I’ve had some dependency issues, and installing the kde4 package (a meta-package that will install all of KDE4) would not install due to dependency issues with the kdegraphics package. The way around this is to install the kde4-minimal package and whichever of the other packages you want. So I installed everything, minus the kdegraphics package via the following:
Be prepared for a lot of packages to be installed, for others to be removed, and to possibly break your existing kde3 installation (if you have one). See the first comment to see what I had to install and remove.
Firstly, KDE4 does not import any of your KDE3 settings, which is pretty annoying, as all of the applications start with the default settings, and is really annoying with applications like kmail … however some has created a tool to import the settings:
My only complaint about the tool, is that it requires root to install it. I’d also like the option to be able to run the tool without first having to install it. Anyways, it seems to work pretty well and imported all of my mail into kmail, the only thing it didn’t do was import account settings into kmail.
This post is a work in progress, I’ll update it over the next day or so with any further instructions as I install, configure, and test KDE4.
