A Tale of Mac OS/X, Virtual PC 6, Oracle Universal Installer, and Cygwin/X for telecommuters

Well, it is possible to get cygwin/X running on Virtual PC 6.1.1 under Mac OS/X 10.3. There are some tricks (simply to make it work, and to preserve your sanity......all Windows OSs are NOT created equal), so please bear with me while I provide some "color" to my tale.....

Now, you may ask why anyone would want to get this combo working on a Macintosh Powerbook G4 running OS/X 10.3.5? You can get X windows for OS/X directly. And how does this apply to Oracle?

Read on......

The world is populated by Windows machines, and as a database consultant, I have to access a multitude of client sites "remotely" since travel is not an option for a myriad of reasons. That means you enter the world of VPNs, which are in heavy use today, and getting more common by the minute. And the world of VPNs is dominated by Windows software ( NOT the VPN that you get w/Windows direct from Microsoft, but the proprietary ones like Contivity, Cisco, Avaya, etc). Further VPN's do not "like" to be installed on the same machine as other VPN's ( these things do not "play well" together), so if you are working with 3-4-5 customers and all the associated VPN software is from different vendors...well you can see the problem even if you don't toss in the point that I wanted to use my Mac that I had already paid for with hard earned, cold, unadulterated CASH.

That was my original motivation for getting Virtual PC...so one could use the Windows VPN software to access the client sites, by defining
"multiple" virtual PCs each with their own software installed for a
specific customer, and do it all from (1) laptop..... AND IT WORKS!

The next issue came from our "friend"... Oracle Corporation. On Unix (Sun, HP, AIX, Linux) the Oracle installer is the "Universal Installer"...ie it is a java based & X-based program. Character based telnet installs are not a real option anymore (unless you get into editing all the "response files" for a non-interactive install) ...... much to a telecommuter's regret and dismay.

That means I needed to come up with a means of running remote X-apps, through the client's VPN under Windows, but (in my case solely as a matter of personal preference) on a Macintosh OS/X system. There is now a version of Virtual PC for Windows letting you define multiple Win OS's on the same Intel platform ( I do, in fact, have an older Compaq laptop ), but that means I have to by a newer Intel based laptop with more disk & memory & the Win Virtual PC software, and I didn't want to spend the $$$ there.

Enough of the "tedious" background...but you do now have a good feel for the situation....

I looked at several commercial Windows X servers (since I had to use Window's based VPNs) , and all would run under Virtual PC but in true Murphy's form, each had its own "problem" with the Oracle Universal Installer...fonts, missing buttons, etc. The glitches were well documented around the various Oracle www sites, but no real good solutions were available unless you could get a customer to change their X client setup "just for you" ( not a point you really want to ask a paying customer), upgrade their Oracle site-wide to get a newer version of java ( only a few hundred thousand dollars for that one), or you could find V6 of the 'X' server software (which was now on V12..lotsa luck on that one). Then I came across cygwin/X...

Now I like free software in my business, it allows me to spend more money on my hobbies. So I downloaded cygwin/X onto two different Virtual PC setups on my Mac...one is Windows 2000, the other is Windows 98SE.

In the case of the basic cygwin, one has to increase the environment space for storing PATH information, etc. Once that was done, cygwin would come up under both Windows OSs, but it was much slower under Win 2000.

Next I needed the X software running. For each Windows OS, I tried startxwin.bat & startxwin.sh. Sorry to say, these were a no go. The
"X" showed up in the task bar, but no xterm was generated, and no X
app would display. I should not say they never worked, startxwin.bat did work completely (1) time in 5 days of trial and error...but it never repeated.

So then I went back a step to the very basics .... to the cygwin admin window .... and entered....

xinit -- -kb

and IT WORKED! It worked on both OSs, but it was much ...much faster in Win 98SE. This was with the VPN running ( my only immediate need is for the Avaya VPN, but I plan to test it with some of the others as well at a later date).

After the xterm appeared, I started the Oracle Installer on the remote Sun system using

ssh -Y username_at_host /usr/openwin/bin/xterm

and then from the Sun xterm, I could run the Installer ( I could have run it directly from ssh, but after the install you usually have to check some things, so I wanted a xterm window ready, willing, and able), and it displayed back on the Mac WITH NO VISIBLE PROBLEMS.

So, cygwin/X now lets me run the Oracle software, displayed back to my existing Mac, without having to purchase either a commercial Windows X server ( around $300), or buy a another laptop ($1,000-2,000). I can have it on each virtual PC, with a different VPN for each client, and all is right with the world.

And that is the end of my tale....

Dr Robert Young
www.aliconsultants.com Received on Fri Sep 03 2004 - 12:08:58 CDT