Macro Rant

Alright, so this happened a while ago. Back in January of this year. This is my first opportunity to really talk about it. Well, overall I have to say it’s been a negative for me personally. My primary let down was more recent with the death of OpenSolaris(or should I say murder?). Really this was tragic for me. I love OpenSolaris. I think it has a lot to offer the SMB and even some enterprise markets on a budget. Personally I use it to safeguard my data using ZFS volumes which are exported to iSCSI targets using COMSTAR, over which I place a NTFS partition since the majority of my work is done from a Windows machine. Lightning fast? No. It works exactly as I need it to. It checksums my data and provides easy backups, not to mention deduplication.

Anyways, I ‘m getting off target here. Oracle seems to be following suit with the rest of the big boys with all of the patent and copyright lawsuits. It seems that litigation has become a revenue producing branch of every large corporation these days. Especially software companies. It’s a sad progression to watch because I believe it is stifling innovation. It’s difficult to pass judgment because  companies and individuals deserve to reap the benefits of their creations but at the same time there needs to be a cohesiveness with innovation and progress. We can’t hold ourselves 10 years behind the curve so that XYZ company can squeeze that last .1% in profits out of their properties/products.

Oh Oracle. I hope  that, going forward, this doesn’t get any worse. You’re upsetting people. =(

I came across a stumbling block the other day that I thought I would share, since the information is not readily available via a Google search.

Problem:

1. You have a 64-bit linux operating system (CentOS 5.2 x86_64 in my case)
2. You’d like to use XAMPP (which currently doesn’t have a 64-bit compiled version)

If you don’t have the right fix applied or the right libraries (32-bit) installed XAMPP will fail to start

[root@localhost lampp]# /opt/lampp/lampp start
XAMPP is currently only availably as 32 bit application. Please use a 32 bit compatibility library for your system.

The solution here is two part, some people in Ubuntu have had success just installing the 386 compatibility library with apt-get and the script is reportedly functioning as intended, aka starting up the various daemons.

However some of us, aka CentOS5.2, even when the compatibility libraries are installed

yum install glibc*

or

`sudo apt-get install ia32-libs`

if you’re in Ubuntu per Tim

it will still report that it can’t run on a 64-bit operating system.  Well this is just plain false. The built-in check in the lampp script is not sufficient to establish whether or not the 32-bit daemons will function or not. My solution? Well, being very sure that all the necessary dependencies are present, I just commented out the check.

nano /opt/lampp/lampp # I use nano, but you can use the editor of your choice

and we’re off and running.

[root@localhost lampp]# uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 #1 SMP Tue Dec 16 11:57:43 EST 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[root@localhost lampp]# lampp start
Starting XAMPP for Linux 1.7…
XAMPP: Starting Apache with SSL (and PHP5)…
XMAPP: Starting MySQL…
XAMPP: Starting ProFTPD…
XAMPP for Linux started.
[root@localhost lampp]#