The way I saw it, Cuba had to be visited before Castro dies. And then, two days before I fly, I see headlines in the Evening Standard: Castro has fallen and has been hospitalised. Did I get the timing wrong?

No it turns out. He’s still alive and well, locals still talk about him with a hushed reverence normally reserved for religious leaders. The other bonus of arriving in late October is that the flood of winter tourists has yet to start and it’s still in the high twenties.

Introduction

One thing that no-one mentions while you’re at university, planning to go into this industry, is that most of the problems you come across are not technical in nature. Problems with computers are usually fairly tractable and can be solved, even if not elegantly, by anyone who is interested enough to have a go. It’s the other, people problems that are tricky.

I’ve never been the kind of person who just likes to sit on beaches, soaking up the rays. I always burn and I always think that I might be missing something, an amazing sight, some unusual food or a classic local beer.

Sometimes however, I think that I try to over-do things. My recent trip to Poland certainly had the potential. The plan was to fly to Warsaw, try to take in Gdansk, an obscure part of Russia called Kaliningrad that is surrounded by EU states and then nip into Lithuania for a swift look around Vilnius.

I’ve been to Italy a few times over the years, but I’ve somehow managed to avoid Tuscany which is, perhaps, the most favoured of areas with photographers. This Easter I managed to correct that situation with a short walking holiday.

Starting in Pisa, we took a taxi to San Gimignano and walked to Colle di Val d’Elsa. From here we wandered along to Siena, stopping off at interesting looking places and sampling the local food and wine — it’d be rude not to! On the way back, we stopped in Pisa but managed to avoid taking amusing pictures of us propping up the leaning tower. (If only everyone else showed such restraint!)

Introduction

This page is just a rant, a way for me to vent my anger. Don’t expect it to be fully rational or for it to make perfect sense. It could, even, be my excuse for buying new hardware; I do like my gadgets.

In fact, this piece is going to be an anti-Linux rant. If you’ve seen the rest of my website this may surprise you. I have, after all, been using Linux since 1994 when I installed Slackware from a knee-high pile of 3.5 inch floppy-discs. I spent a year writing “The Penguin Says“, a collection of Linux application reviews, I have the Oracle 8i Installation HOWTO in the Linux Documentation Project. I’m no fly-by-night, recent Linux convert.

Introduction

The good: there’s a lot of information in here, everything from the creation of FORTRAN and COBOL to Java and the Internet. It’s all discussed in a friendly, easy manner and rarely gets technical enough to scare off people without a computer science degree. The bad: despite the amount of research the author clearly put in, there’s not a lot new in here. It’s nice having it all in one place but it does, kind of, make the whole book unnecessary. The ugly: they really could have done with some more proof-reading. There are many typos and clumsy sentences that could easily have been improved with some light editing.

# Introduction

It took me over a year to decide to buy a SliMP3 player. I am not normally that indecisive but I just couldn’t figure out why it cost so much. I mean, what does it do? It streams MP3 music across an Ethernet network and connects to the phono sockets on your hi-fi system. How hard can that be? There must be something cheaper or better than the Slim Devices machine! It took me all that time to research the subject and come to the conclusion that there wasn’t. I still think it’s a lot of money for what it does, but I also still think that it’s pretty much unique.

This HOWTO business has got slightly out of hand! There are so many different versions of Oracle and Linux that I’ve been forced to do a little restructuring.

This table should explain the documents that you need. Generally you need the main HOWTO (to answer any questions you might have) and the errata. If you know what you’re doing you might be able to get away with just the errata.

This is the official home page for my Oracle on Linux HOWTO.

The current version is 1.18 and was released on 19 July 2003. It’s been a long time — nearly a year — since the last release which may lead you to conclude that it’s a major update. You would be wrong! I’ve added some text about “how to ignore that this document is out of date” and a few clarifications. (This may sound lazy, but it’s not possible to keep it completely up to date.) This update is mainly for the Linux Documentation Project rather than people that come here.

v1.18, 19 July 2003

With this HOWTO, and a little luck, you will be able to get “Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition for Linux” installed, create a database and connect to it from a remote machine. The main focus of this guide is RedHat Linux 6.0 and Oracle 8.1.5, although it should work well for other recent distributions and more stable versions of Oracle.

## 1. Introduction

## 1.1. What’s in here?

Linux is well known for being difficult and, generally, user hostile. Being a bit of a Unix fan I’m not sure whether I agree with that or not.