SLES!
So, at work I’ve got this oracle database dump that I’ve gotta recover. Some db admin from itap was retiring an oracle server that had this database of tejas’s on it, I guess…
Anyway, here I’ve got an oracle .dmp file, and while I can sorta make out strings and stuff (via “strings” or xxd, or looking at it in wordpad), I don’t see a very easy way to automatically turn it into something useful. And it’s a fairly large dump.
So, the easy route I can find is to install oracle on something, dump the dmp back into the oracle db, and then export it as something useful (probably sql, or csv tables, or something, I dunno).
So, I grabbed the oracle installer like … friday. tried to install it, but all my systems in here are either redhat 7.3 or gentoo. Oracle 10g only installs on rhel2, rhel3, suse enterprise 8, suse enterprise 9, and unitedlinux 1.0. In other words, only on the commercial linuxes. Blech…
So, I looked into the terms I could get rhel, and decided I didn’t like them. Then I looked into the terms on the eval of SLES 9. And the download and config is interesting enough, so I went ahead. Commandiered a decent machine (p4 2.8, 1gb ddr400, quadrofx 500) and grabbed/burned the suse isos, and started the install.
My first impression is …. damn, that’s a fucking SWEET installer. I mean …. it’s great! It’s like … polished, clean, does things that make sense!
Get this …
It took the WinXP install that was already on it, and freaking auto-resized the partition to something reasonable, and made space for itself nondestructively. With NTFS partitions …
That’s freaking …. awesome. That’s all I can say. I mean …. damn.
NVidia drivers out of the box. Trivial x config. Joining it to the domain was also a triviality. There’s something wrong with the winbind config, probably because of how my shares are configured on the fileserver, but that seems easy enough to get to work too…
It’s like …. all the things I struggled to get gentoo to do. All the things I tore hair out and went insane discovering that redhat couldn’t do … It does them all out of the box.
I’m … pretty impressed. Not going to become a suse fanboy or anything, but … this is still pretty dang impressive.