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What do MySQL staff think of the acquisition?

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It finally dawned on me while reflecting on the year past this Sunday that the missing voice since the announcement of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems (and therefore MySQL) has been the MySQL employees.

When I worked as an employee for MySQL Inc, the acquisition by Sun Microsystems in 2008 lead to several requirements about the acquisition.

  • You were not allowed to talk about the acquisition publically.
  • You were not allowed to communicate with any Sun (i.e. the acquirer) resources.

In other words it was “business as usual” which is really an oxymoron, because business will never be exactly as it was before the announcement. The ongoing delay in pending acquisition by Oracle Corporation is really hurting everybody with getting on with doing their jobs, being happy with their work, and making a difference in open source and in the lives of all the benefit from using MySQL.

I’m sure many that have words to say are disappointed, worried or even fearful of their own future careers. Comments are always welcome via Mr Anonymous using 10 minute email.

Virtual Box, a world of hurt

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I successfully installed Virtual box via a few simply apt-get commands under Ubuntu 8.04 via these instructions.

It started fine, after two small annoying, install this module, add this group messages. I was even able to install Ubuntu Intrepid from .iso. But from here it was down hill.

Attempting to start VM gives the error.

This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:
pae
Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for the CPU

Some digging around, and confirmation that the current packaged version of Virtual Box doesn’t support PAE. You think they could tell you before successfully installing an OS. I’m running 1.5.6, I need 1.6.x

$ dpkg -l | grep virtualbox
ii  virtualbox-ose                             1.5.6-dfsg-6ubuntu1                      x86 virtualization solution - binaries
ii  virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-19-generic   24.0.4                                   virtualbox-ose module for linux-image-2.6.24
ii  virtualbox-ose-source                      1.5.6-dfsg-6ubuntu1                      x86 virtualization solution - kernel module

Off to the Virtual Box Downloads to get 1.6.4
Don’t make the same mistake as I did and use the first download link, that’s the commercial version that doesn’t install what you expect, you need the OSE. Of course this is not packaged, it’s only source.

  ./configure
Checking for environment: Determined build machine: linux.x86, target machine: linux.x86, OK.
Checking for kBuild: found, OK.
Checking for gcc: found version 4.2.3, OK.
Checking for as86:
  ** as86 (variable AS86) not found!

Ok, well I go through this step like 4 times, installing one package at a time, I wish they could do a pre-check and give you all missing requirements. I installed bin86, bcc, iasl.

Then I got to the following error.

$ ./configure
...
Checking for libxml2:
  ** not found!

Well it’s installed, all too hard. Throw Virtual Box away for virtualization software. And why am I using it anyway. Because VMWare Server doesn’t work under Ubuntu 8.04 either because of some ancient gcc dependency. Sees I may have to go back to that. I just want a working virtualization people on the most popular Linux distro to install other current distros. It’s not a difficult request.

$ dpkg -l | grep libxml
ii  libxml-parser-perl                         2.34-4.3                                 Perl module for parsing XML files
ii  libxml-twig-perl                           1:3.32-1                                 Perl module for processing huge XML document
ii  libxml2                                    2.6.31.dfsg-2ubuntu1                     GNOME XML library
ii  libxml2-utils                              2.6.31.dfsg-2ubuntu1                     XML utilities
ii  python-libxml2                             2.6.31.dfsg-2ubuntu1                     Python bindings for the GNOME XML library