After switching to Ubuntu, I tried to install Oracle but no luck until I found this guide from Augusto Bott . He has really written an excellent guide on installing Oracle on different versions of Ubuntu. But again with this guide also the users need to open different files and edit them manually. It isn’t that much difficult but if you are like me who often needs to reinstall/upgrade Ubuntu for one reason or other, reading the whole guide and manually editing the system files is really time consuming and cumbersome. So, to save my time for future installation of Oracle database on my Ubuntu box, I wrote a couple of scripts (four scripts to be exact). Running these four scripts will install Oracle database and will give you a fresh database to start with. To facilitate visual-learners, I’ve also made two videos which have been embedded below. I will explain how to proceed briefly below:

1. Download all four scripts.and unzip them

2. Extract Oracle database downloaded from Oracle to a folder (such as in your home folder)

3. Open 2_OraInstaller.sh in a text editor and change the source/destination values. The default values assume that you have extracted the Oracle installer files in ~/oracle folder and you want to install Oracle db in /opt/oracle folder.

4. Open 4_OraInstaller.sh in a text editor and change the name of your database instance (dbSID). The default is oraIntrepid.

5. Fire up the Terminal and make all the files executable:

$chmod 755 ./1_OraInstaller.sh

$chmod 755 ./2_OraInstaller.sh

$chmod 755 ./3_OraInstaller.sh

$chmod 755 ./4_OraInstaller.sh

6. Make sure you have at least 3gb free space where you want to install your Oracle DB

7. Execute: $./1_OraInstaller.sh

You need to logoff and login once

8. Execute: $./2_OraInstaller.sh

This will install Oracle in silent mode. Please be patient as it will take some time and be very sure that YOU ARE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET!!!

9. Execute: $./3_OraInstaller.sh

You need to restart you computer once at this point.

10. Execute: $./4_OraInstaller.sh

This will install Oracle database instance in silent mode. This will take about 15 mins so be very patient.

At this point your Oracle installation on your Ubuntu box is complete.

Here are two videos showing all the above steps:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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1. Create a bash script with the following contents

#!/bin/bash
VirtualBox -startvm NameOfYourVirtualOS

Replace yourSUPassword with your password, and NameOfYourVirtualOS with the name that you have given to your virtual OS in VirtualBox.

2. Name it something like windowsXPGDM (if you want to run Windows XP), make it executable, and then copy it to /usr/bin.

$ chmod 755 windowsXPGDM
$ sudo cp windowsXPGDM /usr/bin

2. Go to /usr/share/xsessions and create a new file with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=WindowsXP
Comment=My Virtual WindowsXP
Exec=/usr/bin/windowsXPGDM
Icon=
Type=Application

3. Save it with a name something like windowsXP.desktop.

4. Log out and you will see a new entry WindowsXP in your GDM session. You can now directly open VirtualBox session without even logging in to your Ubuntu machine.

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But wait! When I clicked the link to see my ‘winner post’ the site was down. I returned back to Digg to read comments. Everybody was complaining about the site being down and asking for a mirror. I checked my Inbox to see if there was anything from my hosting server. There was! This email from my hosting company LunarPages.com

Dear ashokgelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Hello Your account is utilizing excessive resources, causing a significant degradation of services on the server. This is a shared environment and we can not allow one user to utilize the majority of the resources on a server as it affects all users adversely. Because of this, we have temporarily suspended your script: SCRIPT_FILENAME=/home/…/index.php Bellow you have the usage details for your account netkh0 netkhabar.com 4.17 2.32 0.1 Top Process %CPU 50.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/…/index.php Top Process %CPU 39.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/…/index.php Top Process %CPU 32.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/…/index.php CPU 4.17 MEMORY 2.32 MYSQL 0.1 Please note that the above mentioned resource usage is due to PHP processing.Please upgrade your scripts as soon as possible. Please let us know what changes you will be making to correct this issue and we can re-provide ownership of the script to you. We appreciate your understanding in this matter. Thanks. — Best Regards, Vlad Panainte Junior System Administrator 1 support@lunarpages.com Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (U.S. & Canada ) Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (International)
—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —-

I replied them saying that this was because one of my posts made to the front page of Digg.com. I was fast enough to set up another site http://backuptweaks.quicktweaks.com (it doesn’t exist anymore), and imported all the posts with comments and attachments from quicktweaks backend. I installed WP Super Cache plugin, enabled it and redirected quicktweaks.com to backup.quicktweaks.com. Everything went right. Aha! What a relief! But wait again! 403 Forbidden! I thought I messed up something because of WP-Cache. Again, to keep Diggers happy, I was quick to setup another site http://qtbackup.quicktweaks.com (it’s still there). As soon as I was done, I got the same error 403 Forbidden message. Fired up Fireftp and checked the permission. All the permissions were taken away from me.

My hosting server couldn’t handle the Digg effect, and it was getting hard for me to handle diggers’ comments. Luckily, only permission for the index.php file was taken away for quicktweaks.com. I decided to create a new file index2.php and setup a redirect to execute index2.php instead of index.php. To do so, I added the following lines in my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine  on
RewriteRule    ^index\.php$  index2.php

It worked for about five minutes then immediately I got a new email notification. Who else it could be other than the LunarPages itself:

Dear Ashok Gelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Hello, Unfortunately, we have been forced to temporary suspend your account, as numerous folders were continuously having excessive apache connections, causing high stability to the server:
~/backuptweaks/ ~qtbackup/ Here is only a small cut from the list of connections that the folders were having at the moment: 2-0 6308 4/14/14 K 0.05 4 4 10.1 0.43 0.43 99.227.220.98 backuptweaks.quicktweaks.com GET /wp-content/themes/personal/images/bg-older-posts.gif HTTP/ 3-0 6309 7/19/19 K 0.07 1 6 46.8 0.90 0.90 212.242.190.40 backuptweaks.quicktweaks.com
…
…
—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —-

It meant that everything was down, I couldn’t even access my files. Other domains hosted with my same account were also down. I couldn’t access admin backend. Any page was redirected to their page with a notice which asked the webmaster to contact them. Once again I replied them saying this is nothing to do with script file but but because of so called Digg Effect. I asked them when will my site be back.   I  waited their reply for the whole day and finally got this:

Dear Ashok Gelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Dear Customer, We really apologize for the inconvenience. You can log into your server here: https://mantus.lunarmania.com:2083 Please, let us know once you have updated your scripts so we can unsuspend your account. If you have any further questions we will gladly assist you. Thank you for your patience. Best Regards, Jaskaran Sandhu Junior Systems Admin. support@lunarpages.com Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (U.S. & Canada – Toll-free) Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (International)

—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —

I replied with this:

Hi,
I’ve updated my scripts. Its not the fault in my script. Its just one of my articles made to the front page of Digg.com (I repeat!!!) and an unexpected huge amount of traffic diverted towards my site. I’ve never expected that LunarPages is only good enough to host a couple of pages and is only able to bear a handful of visitors. I’ve just installed cache mechanism plugins for my blog (based on wordpress) which means now as soon as a visitor visits a page, it will be cached and after that the page will be served as a static page instead of making request to the database. But for this to happen, my site needs to be up and I need to click few pages so that the cached pages are created. Today’s ’site unavailable’ incident really had a bad impact on my site where I lost a good chance of making my site recognized to a community. A hosting is of no use when it doesn’t allow a webmaster to make an opportunity to make his site famous among a certain group of people. Have I crossed the web space limit? No! Have I used all of the available bandwidth? No! So what’s the reason? You should have made clear before that you are not able to handle more than 10 visitors at a time. Why do you boast being so affordable and so stable hosting company? Why do you advertise shouting ‘unlimited webspace and bandwidth’ when you are not even closes to one gig of bandwidth? I do will write a blog on the useless and inability of LunarPages hosting and I hope that will hit the front page of Digg.com too. But before that would you please let my site take a breath? It might have been dying because of suffocation.
An unhappy customer who thinks that LunarPages hosting sucks!
Thank you anyways and I anticipate your prompt reply and action.

Two hours later I received this response:

Dear Ashok Gelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Hello, I have unsuspended your account, please take necessary steps to lower your usage. If we found that your account is causing high usage then we will permanently suspend your account. If you require a higher usage then allowed on shared servers you might want to try a VPS/dedicated plans. Details on VPS or dedicated plans can be found here: http://www.lpdedicated.com Dedicated servers. http://www.lunarpages.com/virtual-private-server/ vps servers I hope this information is helpful. Please note that the acceptable usage range is 1.0% average %CPU or less, 1.0% average %Memory or less and Top Processes below 20%. Thanks. Best Regards, Jaskaran Sandhu Junior Systems Admin. support@lunarpages.com Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (U.S. & Canada – Toll-free) Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (International)
—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —-

Finally, all the permissions were given back to me. They had put their own .htaccess file and renamed my file to .htacess-suspended. I renamed their .htaccess file to .LunarPagesSucks

As of writing this, the site hasn’t gone down once although I’ve seen an increasing number of traffic most of them from Digg. StumbledUpon and Bookmarks both have sent some traffic too. One thing I don’t understand is that according to one comment from Digg, my site was down before 70 diggs and it was down for the whole day. But the post got dug for the whole day. Before the site was back, it had already received more than 500 Diggs. This made me believe that there are many of those people who blindly Digg a post without bothering to read it.
So what about revenue?
Some of you must be very eager to know about my adsense revenue. One thing I’ve noticed that the Diggers don’t click on any Adwords. The following reports speak themselves:

Lesson learned:

1. If you submit a post to Digg, get prepared.
2. Enable caching for your site. After installing WP-Cache I’ve felt that the page is loading much faster.
3. Never think that you are going to earn lots of money with Adwords. Diggers love reading not clicking your adwords.
4. Never use cheap hosting. When you want to get a hosting account, don’t look for bandwidth or web space. Ask them if they are able to bear Digg Effect.
5. I don’t know about others but LunarPages.com sucks. It can’t even handle 60+ diggs. How shame!

Stat:

Time to bring my site back again: About 16 hours

Time to write the blog and post it: 2 hours

Time to make to the front page: About 14 hours

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Update2: Links updated. Instead of serving files from MediaFire, DropBox is used. Also, those of you having problem with weather or anything else don’t forget to read the comments. Thanks to everyone using this post and spreading the words because of which my hosting server is down several times!

Ever wished that you had new mails notifications right on your desktop? Ever wished you knew the weather info right on your desktop? Ever wished you had your hardware information right on your desktop? Ever wished your desktop was productive and beautiful at the same time? Ever wished you didn’t have to use Mac4Lin theme to hide the ‘ugliness’ of Ubuntu’s native appearance? Ever wished you had a desktop that looked as beautiful as mine? Let’s fulfil your wish:

I have already talked about how to make your Ubuntu desktop look beautiful and productive. This time I will focus mostly on Conky. Conky is a lightweight system monitor for X. Not only monitoring system, with a little bit of scripting, it can be useful to know your new mails, weather info etc.

Here I’ve attached all the required files, attached my Conky configuration file and explained how to make your desktop look similar to mine.

[Updated]

1. Read my previous post about AWN and Gnome-Do.
2. Install Conky:
   $ sudo apt-get install conky
3. Download this file and save in your home directory(Right-click, Save Link As…save the file as .conkyrc)
4. Make a directory scripts in your home directory. Download these scripts, extract and copy them inside the directory you just created.
5. Download all these fonts, extract and copy them inside .fonts directory in your home directory. If you don’t have the .fonts directory, you need to create it. You might need to have administrative privileges to create this directory.
6. Open .conkyrc file. Look for this line:
   ${execpi 300 python ~/scripts/gmail_parser.py yourgmailusername yourgmailpassword 3}
7. Replace yourgmailusernamewith your username and yourgmailpassword with Gmail password. You might also need to install python-feedparser (thanks Onno and Neil for bringing this to my attention)
   $ sudo apt-get install python-feedparser
8. To monitor your hard disk and CPU temperature install lm-sensors and hddtemp
9. $sudo apt-get install hddtemp
$sudo apt-get install lm-sensors
10. Now you need to know the location id for your location for weather info. Head to http://weather.yahoo.com. Enter city or zip code for your location and click go. Copy the location ID from the adress bar. For examples the location id for Geneva, Switzerland is SZXX0013, for Kathmandu, Nepal is NPXX0003
11. Open pogodynka.sh file look for this line kod=USID0025. Replace USID0025 with the location ID you got from step 10 above
12. If you want the temperature in Celsius instead of Farenheit, find the following line:
    w3m -dump http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/"$kod".html | grep -A21 "Current" | sed 's/DEG/°/g' > $plik
    Replace it with:
    w3m -dump http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/"$kod"_c.html | grep -A21 "Current" | sed 's/DEG/°/g' > $plik
13. Create a new empty file in your home directory. Name it weather. Leave the file as it is; do nothing with the file.
14. Bring Run Applicationdialog box (Alt+F2) type conky to launch it
15. If everything goes right, your desktop should be looking much ‘cooler’

More info:

• My wallpaper, The Farm House, is from http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/details/1545/the_farmhouse.html
• Emerald Theme is Scaled_Black_Mod from gnome-look.org
• More variables for conky
• Settings variables for conky

[If you want to share your desktop and want me to show the best looking desktops on my blog, shoot an email to admin[at]quicktweaks[dot]com along with the screenshot of your desktop and the conky file (if you wish). If you decide to send your conky file, don’t forget to delete your gmail username and password. Sharing is learning!]

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A friend of mine writes “…when I open some heavy sites with Firefox, my Ubuntu desktop gets freeze. I can’t close the Firefox so I find no other way than to restart my system. Aren’t there any other ways to unfreeze the system without restarting?”
Yes there are!


The most efficient way to unfreeze your system is to be patience. Don’t try to open other applications, when your system is not responding. Don’t press unnecessary keys. Go have a cup of coffee, get fresh and get back. You system might have already been unfrozen or a dialog box might be waiting for you to click on that Force Quit button. (I promise you won’t be greeted by BSOD!)

If you don’t have much patience or your system just can’t unfreeze automatically, then follow these steps:

1. Hit Caps Lock or Num Lock keys to see if your keyboard is responding, if it isn’t than you’re out of luck.
2. Press Ctrl+Alt+F2, you will be taken to a black&white terminal window. It will ask you for your username and password.
3. Type the following command to get the PID (process ID) of the program that is not responding (in this example Firefox)
   ps -A | grep firefox
4. It will display you the PID of firefox. You should get at least two PIDs something similar to:
   5961 ? 00:00:00 firefox-2
   5977 ? 00:01:12 firefox-2-bin
5. Now issue the following command to kill the non-responding firefox (its PID is 5977 in this example)
   kill 5977
   [update: If you hate working with numbers you can also kill the non-responding program by issuing: killall firefox-2-bin]
6. Re-check that you have successfully killed the non-responding program:
   ps -A | grep firefox
7. If it doesn’t show you anything, then you are done. To exit and get back to your Graphical System, press Ctrl+Alt+F7

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1. Get a picture and open it with GIMP.
2. Go to Image>Mode>Indexed…
3. Make the maximum no. of colors to 14. To do this, enter 14 in the box that shows the default value of 255.
4. Click Convert
5. Your image might not look that good, but GRUB screen can handle only 14 colors. If you don’t like the 14 color picture at all, try changing the color to grayscale (Image>Mode>Grayscale). Some pictures look great in grayscale than in 14 colors.
6. Go to Image>Scale Image…
7. Set the width as 640 pixels and height as 480 pixels. You might need to click on the Chain icon to be able to set the exact size.
8. Click Scale
9. You have to save the file as a X PixMap image. Go to File>Save As… In the save dialog box Click on Select File Size (By Extension). From the drop down menu, select X PixMap image (third option from bottom). Give a filename, Save and close GIMP.Make the archive of the image:
10. R-click on the the file you have just saved and select Create Archive…
11. Give a name (the default should be okay). Don’t forget the save the file type as .gz. From the extension menu select .gz.
12. Click CreateCopy the archive file to /boot/grub/mygrubimages
13. Those who know how to copy files using Terminal window can easily do that. For those who prefer graphical way of copying files should open the Run Dialog box (Alt+F2) and type:
    gksu nautilus /boot/grub/ and hit enter. If it asks for your password, give it.
14. Create a new folder, name it mygrubimages (you can name it anything) and copy the archive file into it.
15. Open /boot/grub/menu.lst. Again in the Run dialog box, type:
    gksu gedit /bott/grub/mnu.lst and hit enter. If it asks for password again then you know what to do – restart and use Windows Vista. It never nags you for doing any administrative tasks!
16. In the file that opens, add a following line:
    splashimage=/boot/grub/mysplashimages/nameOfArchiveFile.gz
17. Save the file, restart your Ubuntu box, and get ready to be welcomed by your favorite picture

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