Installing VMWare Player on Ubuntu 12.04

I am still customizing my Ubuntu environment and every day is something new :) This time is VMWare Player. Mostly I use this to power up Virtual Windows machines to do some testing and to execute some proprietary software.

First, download the latest version of VMWare Player from here. At the time of this post the latest version was 4.0.4 and I used the 32 version. It should be the same if you have the 64 bit one. You might need to register in order to download the file and once you have it. It will probably be downloaded as .txt so you will have to rename it to .bundle

In order to run the installer we need to download some dependencies. To do that we execute this:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

Once all the dependencies are installed we need to give the installer execution permissions. We do that using this command:

chmod +x VMware-Player-4.0.4-744019.i386.bundle

Then we execute it:

sudo VMware-Player-4.0.4-744019.i386.bundle

At this point the installation window should show up and you just follow it

Starting installation

VMware stadistics

Checking for updates

Ready to install

Installing

Installation completed

 At this point VMware is installed but If you try to execute it, you will get the next error

we need to patch it

VMware error

To make it run on Ubuntu 12.04 we need to patch it. To do so we download the patch and edit it before we apply it just to reflect the version we are using. So let's do it

sudo apt-get install patch
wget http://webupd8.googlecode.com/files/vmware802fixlinux320.tar.gz
tar -xvf vmware802fixlinux320.tar.gz

We have have downloaded the patch and unpacked it. Now we need to edit the patch-modules_3.2.0.sh file. Change the plreqver value to the version you are installing in this case 4.0.4, save it and close it.

edit patch file

Finally we apply the patch:

sudo ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh

applying the patch

And that is all. Now we launch the application again and we should see the License Agreement and once we Accept it the application will show up

License Agreement

VMware Player

It is not that complicated, but you do need some knowledge using command line. Hope it helps some one.

Happy Hacking!

How to Install Oracle SQL Plus on Ubuntu 12.04

On my day to day work I have to deal with Oracle a lot! and since I am trying to use Ubuntu as my working environment I had to install a bunch of things one of them is SQL Plus. I like command line a lot and SQL plus is the best tool for Oracle so I had to have it.

The process is not so complicated. So let's start first you need to go to the Database Instant Client page and download the one specific to your platform. This post is for 32 bit so you have to download the Instant Client Downloads for Linux x86 one. It should be the same for the 54 bit though. From there you need to download these 2 rpm files:

• Instant Client Package - Basic: All files required to run OCI, OCCI, and JDBC-OCI applications
• Instant Client Package - SQL*Plus: Additional libraries and executable for running SQL*Plus with Instant Client

If you want, you can download the SDK :

• Instant Client Package - SDK: Additional header files and an example makefile for developing Oracle applications with Instant Client

Since these are rpm files we need to convert them to deb, in order to that we need to install the alien utility

sudo apt-get install alien

Once that is done, go to the folder where the rpm files are located and execute the following

alien -i oracle-instantclient-basic*.rpm
alien -i oracle-instantclient-sqlplus*.rpm
alien -i oracle-instantclient-devel*.rpm

These commands will convert the rpm files on the fly and install them. Now you can test it by just typing sqlplus on the command line. For sure it will complain about a couple of things. One of them maybe about a missing libaio.so.1 . This one is easy, we just need to install it a simple

sudo apt-get install libaio1

The next error might be about missing libraries like libsqlplus.so. The libraries are there but SQL Plus can't find them. We need to add them to our PATH this is easy as well. We just need to create an oracle.conf file inside /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ so lets do that. I use vi because I like it, but you can use whichever editor you want to create the file.

sudo vi /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle.conf

then we add this:

/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client/lib/

Notice that in my path I have 11.2 be careful with this. You can navigate and check that the path is correct for yours. 11.2 is the version we are installing. At the time of this post 11.2 was the latest one. Once you save the file we need to update the configuration by running:

sudo ldconfig

Now you should be ready to connect using:

sqlplus username/password@//dbhost:1521/SID

If you have problems with the SDK, you can check this post.
Hope it helps someone and happy coding!