Sun has acquired MySQL AB. From the report:

But the biggest news of the day is… we’re putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP.

Blergh.

Technorati Tags: sun, mysql, takeover, acquired, acquires, buy, lamp, linux, woe onto us

I’ve taken the time to torrent a rescue CD for Asus’ Eee PC. On it, there’s a complete disk image which I used to configure and run the Eee software inside a Qemu.

From what I have seen in the first hour, the system looks pretty messed up. It’s running Xandros Linux, which is in turn based on Debian. It eschews running the normal boot process through /sbin/init, and instead relies on a binary called /sbin/fastinit. It simply runs startx as user “user”. The terminal is available by hitting Ctrl-Alt-T, defaults to an UTF version of xterm. User “user” is in the sudoers file, so you can just sudo whatever you want.

I’ll be playing around with the default installation for a few days before I decide if it’s of any use or if it should get junked. In the meanwhile, I’ll try to explain to my girlfriend why I need another gadget and maybe even buy it.

The thing that I like the most is that it’s a piece of complete, self contained hardware for a meager price. I mean, I always wanted to have a go at laptop case modding, but price was always an issue. This thing, hell, this is practically free for a PC of these (quite decent) properties.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the interface running on my Debian Linux laptop:

Technorati Tags: asus, eee pc, eeepc, pc, linux, qemu, torrent

It seems that there’s something seriously broken on Debian regarding Tora and Oracle.

To be specific, Debian’s Tora package depends on iODBC, which in turn doesn’t seem to work with Oracle’s Linux client. The resulting situation is that the Oracle’s driver screams this:

1: SQLDriverConnect = [iODBC][Driver Manager]/opt/instantclient_10_2/libsqora.so.10.1: undefined symbol: bcuMsgBoxError (0) SQLSTATE=00000

I’ve traced this to the fact that UnixODBC exposes a bcuMsgBoxError function, which doesn’t seem to exist in iODBC.

Now the question is, can I manually unpin Tora from using iODBC without recompiling it. I’m currently working on finding this out. I hope it works out because I would really love to use Tora on Linux.

Technorati Tags: tora, linux, debian, bcumsgboxerror, problem, oracle