Confession: I got through a 41 year career in IT, mostly in banking and government, without ever compiling or running a COBOL program. I recently saw A very short introduction to COBOL, which describes how to install COBOL on a Mac and how to compile and run a very simple COBOL program. So I tried this on Ubuntu Linux 20.04.
Continue readingTag Archives: linux
For Unix/Linux people
The Religion of Unix
Another Linux installation
PCs vs. Macs
Linux Distributions
A family tree.
From the TCLUG mailing list.
Firefox on Ubuntu
Generally I am quite happy with Ubuntu Linux, but there are some annoyances. One is that the official Ubuntu repositories are not keeping up with the major releases from Mozilla (why?). I was running Firefox 3.6.20 on this box using Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) while Mozilla is now at Firefox 6.0. Fortunately the fix is very simple:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox
So I am now running 6.0. Since I have added the repository I should now be able to stay current without any special effort.
Oracle for real
More than two years ago I took an introductory class on the Oracle database management system. Oracle is used in my organization, but not nearly as much as SQL Server, which is where I had been spending almost all my time. My supervisor was an experienced Oracle DBA and handled such tasks as came up. However, she just left, to take a job in the private sector. I have inherited the role of Oracle DBA. She gave me a lot of information before she left, but there was only so much she could cover in the available time. So I have a lot to figure out on my own. Oracle is very different.
Oracle here at work runs on Linux (Red Hat and Suse). All the time I have spent working on Linux at home will now pay off. The Linux support team hers is small (three people), but very good. I am looking forward to working with them.
Security incident
At xkcd. Check the mouseover!
Wine for reading
Getting Amazon Kindle for PC running in Ubuntu under Wine
There are several versions of these instructions out on the web. I chose this version because it
- was detailed
- had specific details for Ubuntu
- was current (01/08/10 is a European style date, as you can see from the other entries here).
The instructions worked and I have Kindle for PC up and running on Ubuntu 10.04. It felt somewhat unnatural to specify Windows 98 as the OS version, but I will get over that :-)>
This was my first taste of wine. It went down easily and I think I want more :-)>