Technical Details

If you ask me the Java installer is broken, at least from a usability perspective.

Here’s a breif list:

• You have to install demos and samples (I don’t want them installed)
• The installer spawns at least one other installer (this installer doesn’t pick up the path from the previous install, very dum)
• Even though you want to install things in some place other than  “Program Files” the  JavaDB is  installed there (idiots)
• If you grab the Java EE + SD, it doesn’t install the JRE, WTF, so I’m not going the other route install the JRE/JDK and then install Java EE
• I’m probably going to uninstall JavaDB and download the standalone installer to install it again (sheesh)
• The JavaDB (any platform) installer isn’t one, just a zip, somehow I find this more comforting (but the download page lists Windows 2000 as one of the options, what is this 1999?)
• Too many options on their download page Java EE/JDK Update 3/Net Beans blah blah blah http://developers.sun.com/downloads/

Sun, do yourself a favour (and everyone else at the same time) and get your act together.

I’ve become a big fan of vmware, but if you undersize a virtual disk and need to expand it on Linux, brace yourself for about an hours worth of work (at minimum.)

Here’s the process I eventually followed (this seems way too hard/complicated)

• BACKUP up your virtual machine!!!
• expand the virtual disk:

  vmware-vdiskmanager -x 16GB myDisk.vmdk
  

for instance this will size myDisk to 16GB (this size isn’t additive it’s an absolute size)

• Now you must boot your virtual machine into DOS or some OS that will recognize your disk, I went the BartPE route and added the vmware scsi driver so it would recognize the
  scsi disk. I couldn’t find the actual scsi driver on the web fotunately I had a copy of the VMWare Converter which
  contains a copy of the drivers. You can follow the instructions at this site but the driver that is offered is incomplete.
• Once you’ve booted BartPE start diskpart and issue the following commands:
  • diskpart> list disk
  • diskpart> list volume
  • diskpart> select volumen=n
  • diskpart> extend
  • diskpart> exit
• Reboot the virtual machine, restarting Fedora (or your brand of Linux)
• Start the Linux Volume Manager (lvm)
  • Find the physical volume with lvm> pvscan
  • Resize the physical volume lvm> pvresize /dev/sda?
  • Resize the logical volume lvm>  lvresize -L 14G /dev/VolGroup01/LogVol00
  • lvm> exit
• Finally resize your filesystem with (on Fedora, other brands of linux may have a different command):

root# resize2fs /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00

• Sheesh, that was a lot of work, the procedure for windows seems slightly easier, but I couldn’t find all this information
  easily in one place for Fedora/Linux, good luck.