TheBonsai's Blog

Since a week or so I replaced my old “home server” with some new hardware. Phenom II Quadcore with 8GB RAM and a Debian Lenny, fun!

A rant! A rant!

Today, somebody (thanks exaltis on Freenode) provided me a link to an OSNews article during a discussion about X. He told me it’s fun to read – I clicked.

In this article (also read the comments), Thom Holwerda talks about why the X Window System is bad and Linux needs a different graphics architecture. This article is nice to read and discusses existing problems in some applications and X server software.

All problems he talks about are real, yes. I can understand that he’s pissed off. And he, as end-user, wants a solution and a stable system.

But his conclusions that these problems come from the design of the X Window System itself are just wrong and show that he doesn’t know what the design of X is. X has enough problems in its design, but none of them are related to the problems in his article. He talks about bad design, but he actually means bad implementation. Even his example with driver crashes or driver updates are completely irrelevant for the X design, the X Window architecture allows ways to implement this. That nobody does this doesn’t mean it’s a design problem.

From what I can see in the text he just would say to me that he’s a user and not a tech and he doesn’t care and he just wants a working system.

Yes, right, he’s a user. That’s why he shouldn’t conclude it’s a design problem, he should just talk about what he knows and not about what he thinks he knows.

For a new system on SLES10SP2 I wanted to operate 3 separate instances (ASM, 2 databases) from 3 separate ORACLE_HOMEs. The theory isn’t that complex, so I simply installed and patched up the 3 different ORACLE_HOMEs.

After configuring the ASM instance with the creation assistant and enabling the instance in /etc/oratab, I did a reboot. Finally I wrote a small shell function db_change() to change ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID and PATH on the fly to operate on the different instances.

Nothing. I wasn’t able to connect with sqlplus. Read the rest of this entry »