Oracle 11g XE on Mint 13

I switched from Ubuntu 10.04 to Mint 13 in July.  The new Oracle 11g XE is only available in RPM format, and there are other problems, and I'm not using Oracle DB at work these days, so I didn't get around to reinstalling Oracle.

I had some time today and following this:

Installing Oracle 11gXE on Mint and Ubuntu

was able to get it working.  Cool, thanks Mike!

Installing Java EE 6 tutorials on Linux Mint 13

In the good old days, all the Java tutorials could simply be downloaded as a ZIP file or compressed tar file.  But somewhere along the line Sun/Oracle decided to make us use the Glassfish updatetool instead.

I tried this today and had several problems.

(1) Error:

The software needed for this command (updatetool) is not installed.

If you choose to install Update Tool, your system will be automatically
configured to periodically check for software updates. If you would like
to configure the tool to not check for updates, you can override the
default behavior via the tool's Preferences facility.

When this tool interacts with package repositories, some system information
such as your system's IP address and operating system type and version
is sent to the repository server. For more information please see:

http://wikis.oracle.com/display/updatecenter/UsageMetricsUC2

Once installation is complete you may re-run this command.

Would you like to install Update Tool now (y/n): y

Proxy: Using system proxy settings.
Install image: /home/lmulcahy/java/netbeans/glassfish-3.1.2.2
Installing pkg packages.
Downloading 2 packages.
Downloading pkg (511 files, 6,237,937 bytes).
File 4/511#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00007fdaaf95e3ef, pid=8767, tid=140576351434496
#
# JRE version: 7.0_07-b10
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (23.3-b01 mixed mode linux-amd64 compressed oops)
# Problematic frame:
File 7/511[thread 140576350381824 also had an error]
File 44/511*** glibc detected *** /usr/local/java/jdk1.7.0_07-x86_64/bin/java: invalid fastbin entry (free): 0x0000000001502d50 ***
[thread 140576349329152 also had an error]
[thread 140576348276480 also had an error]
# [ timer expired, abort... ]
Aborted (core dumped)

Fixed by: Enable the proxy server:

export http_proxy=http://localhost:3128/

(And of course you need to have an actual proxy server.  This is Squid running on port 3128).

 (2) Error:

WX import error.  Verify the WX widgets are in the PYTHONPATH.
The following can be reported to GlassFish Update Tool 2.3.5 Development Team .

Traceback (innermost last):
  File "/home/lmulcahy/java/netbeans/glassfish-3.1.2.2/updatetool/vendor-packages/updatetool/common/boot.py", line 283, in init_app_locale
    import wx
  File "wx/__init__.py", line 45, in ?
  File "wx/_core.py", line 4, in ?
 ImportError: libjpeg.so.62: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Fixed by: (Credit to Scott Dunbar) Install the 32 bit version of libjpeg62:

sudo apt-get install libjpeg62:i386

Interestingly enough, libjpeg62:i386 didn't appear in Synaptic, but installing it this way from the command line worked.

Hope this saves someone the hour or so it took me to figure this out.