If you need to control your server, but can’t actually be at its keyboard, RealVNC is lean, mean and … FREE! See the picture I’ve taken, but don’t mind the mess. You can see the real server to the right, and it’s screen in a window on my workstation to the left.
I tried to install PostgreSQL, the 7.5 binary development night-build (since I can’t build it from source). The basic procedure is:
- Unzip in directory, let's assume C:PostgreSQL
- Add C:PostgreSQLBin and C:PostgreSQLlib to PATH
- Add environmentvariable PGDATA and have it point to C:PostgreSQLData
- Now start the following command: initdb -L "C:/postgresql/share"
First problem encountered: PostgreSQL won’t run as admin. So I created a limited-user (I’m using Windows XP Pro) and logged in as that user. The init-command now crashes with an unhandled exception. Can’t see what it is, or what to do about it. Just a message that somebody is sorry for the inconvenience (you know what I’m talking about!).
Let’s wait a while until 7.5 with the real Windows installer is there. In some online documents I read that this Windows support was supposed to be included in version 7.4 already. But hey, who cares about tons of users?
If you have an USB-key or pendrive, then this tool from HP allows you to format it so you can boot from it. Think of the possibilities: as a rescuedisk, as an alternative way of booting Linux, as Symantec Ghost bootdisk, whatever. Great.
Since I participate in the RC-72 contest of Distributed.net, I regularly visit the stats pages. A while ago, the guys switched from Sybase to PostgreSQL as their database of choice. On the statspages the PostgreSQL-logo is displayed, so I clicked it recently.
PostgreSQL looks like a good choice if you are, like me, accustomed to Oracle. I hope version 7.5 will bring a decent Windows version, since Cygwin is not something I like very much. But tablespaces, replication, foreign-keys and subselects are things I do like. I’ll let you guys know when I installed it, and what my findings are.