Ubuntu 9.10 + Mono(WinForms) = Problem

We have one very big application written in C# that is using WinForms. So I decided to test this app on my laptop - Dell Ispiron 6400 using my current installation of Ubuntu 9.10. There ware no problems on Ubuntu 8.04 or Windows machines but ... here comes the big BUT :D on my machine (9.10) I see buttons menus, text boxes etc. but no text! All text was missing.
Started to google this problem to locate a solution. After searching and reading for few hours here is the solution ;)

Original Mono thread is here. After reading this I started to understand that this is not a Mono bug but problem with my Intel Xorg driver. I downloaded and installed it as described here (almost)

download needed driver (in my case 2.9.1)
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
if everything is fine execute the next 2 lines but you will need some extra libraries to install before configure finishes whit no errors.
$ make
$ sudo make install
reboot PC or restart GDM service

Cool, everything went well till now ... but ... oh no one more BUT :D. Well no that big any way.
Next what happened to me is this: I can see only part of the texts. Solutions can be found in the link I posted ;). Change your Appearance -> Fonts settings and you are done. Problem solved!

O3Spaces tests

In the company we have decided to test different DMS systems. I will start with the O3Spaces and later will describe my experience with OpenXchange - both using community editions.
Everything was installed very smooth using .deb packages. OK, now what? I'm connecting to the management interface and to the spaces interface using Firefox. I'm able to manage the company, users and spaces. I'm also able to document using web browser.
The next step is to integrate it with OpenOffice (3.x in my case). So I installed the Workplace assistant (no problems here) and tried to install the OO plugin ... ops!!!
I did a lot of different things to make it install in the first place. I was able to install it using the OO extension manager, because the automatic installation was not working. Plugin is installed but still not functional ... why ... why ... ;(
I spend 1 day searching for solution with no success! Then I have decided to test on SuSE. Connected to Spaces server ... installed Workspace assistant ... installed plugin everything was smooth and easy. Then I noticed that SuSE is using Sun Java engine and on Ubuntu I'm using Openjdk?! I removed it and installed the java from Sun. This solved my problem! I was able to install plugin using normal procedure via Workplace assistant. i was able to connect to Spaces from OO and edit files.
My fight was over :)
We ware able to test this DMS in our work environment. I can recommend this one it is very easy to work with it. Also the community edition is free for up to 10 users.

Oracle XE + Ubuntu 9.04

The installation of Oracle XE on Ubuntu 9.04 was very easy. There is also very well done web based administration.
After installation I tried to connect with PHP to the server. And here is the first problem. There is no OCI8 or PDO_OCI extensions in the Ubuntu's repository.
I tried to compile both of this, but I was able to do this with OCI8 extension and not with PDO extension.
There is a problem with PDO dev files, for some reason configuration always ends with this error: "configure: error: Cannot find php_pdo_driver.h", searched google but with no success ... the file is there but configure is able to locate it.

After OCI8 extension I tried to to connect by sqlplus program: /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/client/scripts/sqlplus.sh
First try ended with this error: "TNS:net service name is incorrectly specified" the solution I found was to add two rows to /etc/profile:
export ORACLE_SID=PROD1
export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server

Now everything works!