So, you changed your server hostname and you have Oracle XE running. And you think life’s simple and beautiful. It isn’t. You wish. Changing hostnames is. Oracle is always like that boyfriend (or girlfriend) you had in high school, full of issues and never happy and always needy. Yeah, I despise Oracle, that attention whore.

So, here’s the deal, after some research, what it takes to make Oracle ready for some change in your life, some brand new hostnames:

#1 Find your tsnames.ora and listener.ora files. They are probably located somewhere very intuitive and easy, like /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/network/admin/lol/omgtehinternet/

#2 Change the contents of tsnames.ora

FROM

XE =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = oldhostname.olddomain)(PORT = 1521))
(CONNECT_DATA =
(SERVER = DEDICATED)
(SERVICE_NAME = XE)
)
)

TO

XE =
(DESCRIPTION =
(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = newhostname.newdomain)(PORT = 1521))
(CONNECT_DATA =
(SERVER = DEDICATED)
(SERVICE_NAME = XE)
)
)

Do exactly the same thing with listener.ora

Restart oracle-xe and please, don’t be a fool like me and make sure your SElinux policies are correct before you go nuts and think everything is totally messed up. The errors you get from SeLinux are as intuitive as the oracle path.

Good luck!

I have this HTC Desire Z for more than a year now and I really love it. I think it’s really sad that, nowadays, a year old phone is considered an obsolete phone. The Desire Z is an amazing phone and I don’t feel like buying another just for the sake of the novelty, even though I broke its glass recently.

Ice Cream Sandwich – Android 4 – hasn’t been officially released for my phone yet, and probably won’t, because it’s an old phone. It doesn’t really matter, because I haven’t been using official ROMs since… ever. I run Cyanogenmod since the very first week, and, more recently – due to the lack of nightlies of Cyanogenmod, ILWT – very interesting and efficient mod, if you ask me + Go Launcher Ex. My phone is fast and the battery lasts a lifetime.

This night I had a bit of insomnia and decided to give this Audacity ICS mod a try. The installation was quick and painless and actually pretty fast. But, hell, the thing is SO TACKY, it looks like one of those “things from the future as seen in the 70s”. I cannot have my phone looking like that. It was also considerably slower than ILWT and there was something about the font face used that really, really annoyed me. I couldn’t stand it for more than 15 minutes.

I honestly hope the new CM9 looks… better. You know, aesthetics is important, too. That’s why Apple makes a buttload of money with that piece of garbage that is the iPhone 4 (I hate that thing, but it’s beautiful, beautiful). Yep, I have one too, and dislike it immensely. But it’s pretty, you can’t deny.

I was going to bed, because it’s getting late and tomorrow is Monday, Monday, so good to me. But did you guys see that? Linus Torvalds himself just tagged Linux 3.0-rc1. I THOUGHT THE WORLD WAS COMING TO A COLOURFUL EXPLOSION before we would be seeing that. But it’s true, you all non believers. I went to kernel.org, and I saw with my own eyes.

For your pleasure, I will reproduce the full announcement

Yay! Let the bikeshed painting discussions about version numbering begin (or at least re-start).

I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0. It will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can no longer comfortably count as high as 40.

The whole renumbering was discussed at last years Kernel Summit, and there was a plan to take it up this year too. But let’s face it – what’s the point of being in charge if you can’t pick the bike shed color without holding a referendum on it? So I’m just going all alpha-male, and just renumbering it. You’ll like it.

Now, my alpha-maleness sadly does not actually extend to all the scripts and Makefile rules, so the kernel is fighting back, and is calling itself 3.0.0-rc1. We’ll have the usual 6-7 weeks to wrestle it into submission, and get scripts etc cleaned up, and the final release should be just “3.0″. The -stable team can use the third number for their versioning.

So what are the big changes?

NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We’ve been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one (“20 years”) instead.

So no ABI changes, no API changes, no magical new features – just steady plodding progress. In addition to the driver changes (and the bulk really is driver updates), we’ve had some nice VFS cleanups, various VM fixes, some nice initial ARM consolidation (yay!) and in general this is supposed to be a fairly normal release cycle. The merge window was a few days shorter than usual, but if that ends up meaning a smaller release and a nice stable 3.0 release, that is all
good. There’s absolutely no reason to aim for the traditional “.0″ problems that so many projects have.

In fact, I think that in addition to the shorter merge window, I’m also considering make this one of my “Linus is being a difficult ^&^hole” releases, where I really want to be pretty strict about what I pull during the stabilization window. Part of that is that I’m going to be travelling next week with a slow atom laptop, so you had better convince me I *really* want to pull from you, because that thing really is not the most impressive piece of hardware ever built. It does the “git” workflow quite well, but let’s just say that compiling the kernel is not quite the user experience I’ve gotten used to.

So be nice to me, and send me only really important fixes. And let’s make sure we really make the next release not just an all new shiny number, but a good kernel too.

Ok?

Go forth and test,

Linus

Need a new challenge for the new week? Now you know what to do.

About one month ago, WOMWorld sent me a Nokia n900 for a week, so I could test it. For those who are unaware, the N900 is not exactly a smartphone: it’s more like a portable, pocket-sized computer, which also happens to have a cell phone.

The Good

If you’re a geek, in any level, you’ll fall in love at first sight: it’s OMG a cellphone running Linux? I want that thing NOW! The operating system, Maemo, is debian-based, so it makes installing apps a very simple task, and Nokia got it right and the interface is not that confusing thing I got on my old N78 Symbian – yeah I hate Symbian.

You’re usually one or two clicks away from doing what you need and it has a sliding, full-qwerty keyboard. Typing won’t be an issue. It’s REALLY a small computer just the size of your pockets, and worked like a charm on my GSM carrier.

The Bad

Now that you’re in love and you’ve started your relationship, some things will start to annoy you. You’ll need to add extra (“non trusted” in Nokia lingo) repositories, if you want to install really interesting apps – everything in the “default secure trusted” is booooring and old (this is so Debian I should have expected). The adding new repos thing is not that user-friendly if you’re not used to linux.

You’ll also find out that if you want full root access on your command line, there are also some tricks involved. The N900 is now looking like a geek toy but trying to protect you from playing with it.

After solving these issues, I installed ssh, the apps I wanted and tried to set it up for synchronizing with my Google Life. Now comes…

The Incredibly Awful

The N900 doesn’t carry any kind of app that synchronizes with your google calendar, mail or contacts and their Exchange connector doesn’t work with Google. There are some vague solutions on their forum – even suggesting upgrading the firmware! – but, as I only had the N900 for one week, I couldn’t test ALL of them, and the best I could do was to sync my facebook account and contacts and manage my contacts using the awesome app Hermes.

The thing is: even with my old Symbian phone, it was pretty easy to do Google Sync. HOW COME I have a INCREDIBLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGICAL DEVICE and it does not do Google Sync? Come on, we’re in 2010, these things HAVE TO WORK. So, this is a major turn off on the N900 for me.

The Veredict

It’s a good gadget, it works and it has great battery life (Nokia is the best for battery life, always). I don’t care about camera or embedded music player – I just need them to work, and if they work, it’s ok for me. But if you’re expecting to transfer your Google Life to your pocket, go buy yourself an Android. I’ll have more amazing cell phone stories to share with you. Stay connected.