You have new mail in

when you log into a linux machine.

Sometimes this gets annoying because you always have new mail, or because there seems to be a delay while checking the mail or because the mail is actually stored on some kind of remote disk.

Disabling this setting is easy. Simply include

unset MAILCHECK

in your .bashrc file (for login shell) or .bash_profile (for non-login shells, i.e. ssh) and the message shouldn’t appear.

For me it speeds up login for my linux server and removes clutter.
I got this from:

http://www.savarese.org/patches/bash.html

There is also a more detailed explanation that I found here:

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/1998-08/msg00365.html

This page explans the difference between .bashrc and .bash_profile:

http://joshstaiger.org/archives/2005/07/bash_profile_vs.html

With a physical machine to get autologin in this situation would mean that the machine would boot and immediately log the user in without interaction.

(Of course there is always the point that if someone has physical access to your machine then there’s not much hope anyway. But still …)

Fortunately this is possible and actually quite easy if you don’t mind editing a configuration file.

The file you need is /etc/inittab

The change you need to make is to find the line that looks like:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1

and change it to look like this (where username is the user that you want to autologin as)

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --autologin username tty1

The original source of this is EasyMameCab; which looks like a clever idea in itself. They are using linux as the base system for building a video game cabinet, so obviously they don’t want logins appearing.

This is kind of old news now, because it’s been in use since SQLEditor 1.2 was released. However I though I would explain how I solved the problem that I was having with installing Oracle.

The problem was that I didn’t have a linux machine with enough memory and at the time, qemu wasn’t really fast enough to run Oracle in a virtual machine.

The first strategy I used was to upgrade the memory in my linux box (Cetaganda) to 512 MB. This solved the memory problem and meant that the testing could continue.

Then Parallels Workstation was released, which was able to run Oracle XE in a virtual machine fast enough for regular use. It also uses a different IP address than the host machine, which is useful in itself for testing.

Parallels is definitely the answer to this problem, I don’t need to switch on another machine, there is no additional noise and the performance is excellent for my purposes. I’m even considering adding the loading of the VM to the unit test setup so it will load automatically before the test cycle starts.

I’ve also got MySQL and Postgres running inside virtual machines.

However I did come across a weird problem. I’d installed Debian linux and the console keyboard layout wasn’t correct for my Apple USB keyboard.
The solution was to use this command

dpkg-reconfigure console-data

Which walked me through selecting the right keyboard layout.

[link]

[Edited to correct a typo]

Fortunately Oracle have several downloads that can be used, there is a developer license for 10g and various chargeable options. However the option that is most interesting is Oracle Express. This is a cut down version of Oracle that has some limitations in maximum performance, but otherwise works the same as the regular version. For my purposes it’s perfect, since I’m not actually doing any data processing at all, maximum performance is irrelevant.

So the next step was to download and install a copy.

First I had to select windows or linux. Obviously a difficult choice, so I avoided it and downloaded both just in case.

Next I looked around for a suitable machine to run this database on. Oracle 10g does run on macs, but no word of Intel mac support, so my Imac is out (directly at least).

My next thought was a virtual machine on my Intel Imac ‘aslund’. Qemu runs windows really quite well and it runs linux perfectly well too. Unfortunately despite several hours playing around with settings I couldn’t get anything that would run fast enough and I couldn’t seem to get Oracle to run properly at all. I suspect that either I didn’t get one of the settings right, or there is some other problem somewhere.

Next I thought about ‘cetaganda’, which is my windows box. This meets the minimum requirements of 256MB ram, and has both windows and linux. No worries there.

Unfortunately it was debian linux and this requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux. After some thought I realized that Centos is a clone of Red Hat and so should work just as well. Which is probably would, if only my machine had enough memory. Unfortunately this machine was built to a (small) budget and has integrated graphics. The integrated graphics use memory from the main system for graphics, which reduces it from a nominal 256MB to only about 218 MB. 218MB isn’t enough for Oracle apparently and it complained.

Next step, the windows download (lucky I got them both before).

Windows XP sees the installer, unfortunately the same problem: not enough memory. (Although oddly the release notes mention this being a problem that has been fixed).

Next I may consider my iBook ‘Komarr’, however that will be annoying, because when I tried it before, it was slow.

The best plan may be to add more memory to cetaganda and run it that way.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg00064.html

However I have now properly upgraded to Sarge on marilac. Hopefully this will be a suitably satisfactory release and will provide many hours of happy uptime.