Some of you may be familiar with my rants on the bdg blog about how Linux just isn't ready for the desktop. My opinion on that matter has largely changed with the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), which I have been running with minimal hassle on my newish Gateway MP6954 laptop since last summer. It has a tasty coffee-colored UI (mmm), it NEVER crashes, it basically takes care of itself with updates and has equivalent -- or better -- software for pretty much everything you'd ever want to do with Windows or OSX at a great price: free.

Of course ALUI is only officially supported on two Linux plaforms: RHEL and Suse. But Linux is Linux, right? Well, sort of. I had all sorts of "fun" getting ALUI running on Oracle on Fedora. However, with Ubuntu, getting Oracle and ALUI up was a breeze.

First off, unless you call yourself a DBA, you don't want to mess around with a full-blown Oracle instance. Instead, just follow these easy steps to install something called Oracle XE. It has certain limitations -- the most important of which is that you can't create more than one database.

My first -- and really my only -- mistake during this setup process came next (and it's related to this one-database issue). I tried to drop the XE default database (ORACLE_SID=XE) and run the crdb1_oracle_unix.sql script to create the PLUM10 database. This was a bad idea. I poked around on Google a bit and then thought, well, I don't really need my own database. (Had I had this epiphany before starting down that path, I could have saved two hours and had ALUI up and running on Ubuntu in fewer than 30 minutes.) So, instead of running crdb1_oracle_unix.sql, just edit create_tables_oracle.sql and remove any reference to PLUMINDEX, then run the following commands on the XE database:

$sqlplus sys as sysdba

SQL>create user plumtree identified by password

SQL>grant connect, resource, create view to plumtree

This creates the plumtree user on the XE database, which gives ALUI its own schema, which, for our purposes, is just as good as having your own DB. Now you can basically just run the out-of-the-box scripts (keeping in mind the changes I made to create_tables_oracle.sql):

$sqlplus plumtree/password@XE

SQL>@create_tables_oracle.sql

SQL>@load_seed_info_oracle.sql

SQL>@stored_procs_oracle.sql

SQL>@postinst_oracle.sql

At this point, ALUI was ready to rock. I only ran into one small snag. One of the native search libraries complained about a missing LD_LIBRARY_PATH dependency on libstdc++. This was not a showstopper. I did the following:

$ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.7 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2

From there I configured the bundled tomcat to host the portal and the imageserver and viola, ALUI 6.0SP1, in all its glory, was up and running on Ubuntu. (BTW, I would have used ALUI 6.1.0.1, but when I wrote this article, the RHEL and Suse versions weren't available yet.)

Comments

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• I've also successfully installed ALUI 6.1.1 (6.1MP1) on Ubuntu 7.04 (Server). Required one workaround for the LAX installer shared libraries problem (can't find libc.so.6 etc):

  $cp AquaLogicInteraction_v6-1_MP1 AquaLogicInteraction_v6-1_MP1.bak
  
  $cat AquaLogicInteraction_v6-1_MP1.bak | sed "s/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" > AquaLogicInteraction_v6-1_MP1

  Posted by: rdouglas on May 7, 2007 at 10:45 AM

• hey Chris, appreciate the post! just wanted to give the hint that to change the plumindex on the create_tables script, you can do this in vi: :1,$s/PLUMINDEX/USERS/g

  Posted by: jbell on June 2, 2007 at 8:57 PM

• Chris, nice post...I referenced this post while trying to get the new ALUI 6.1 quickstart installer to correctly intall the portal on windows xp. I've tried the installer on several xp machines but it is still failing...i think the error has to do with the way the installer is setting up the paths/environmental variables - when i run the diagnostics tool i get an invalid entry point...my paths look correct and i've tried re-installing multiple times on multiple machines...any ideas? Thanks.

  Posted by: phil- on September 10, 2007 at 8:41 AM

• Well, after some troubleshooting I figured it out...here is the solution...I hope this is helpful to someone in the future...I needed to rename the icuuc30.dll in C:WINXPsystem32 to icuuc30_from_system32.dll and paste the icuuc30.dll from C:beaaluicommoninxight3.7.6binnative into the C:WINXPsystem32 directory before the installation would work.

  I did try just moving the INXIGHT_PATH variable so that it is loaded on the PATH before the C:WINXPsystem32 but the error still occured. BTW - icuuc30.dll is a component for Unicode version 3.0

  Posted by: phil- on September 12, 2007 at 11:47 AM

• Thank you so much for this post, I had the same problem on XP. I'm just curious, how were you able to debug this problem? What pointed you to icuuc30.dll?

  Posted by: fhkoetje on December 4, 2007 at 9:31 AM