The Multicorn project makes it possible to write Foreign Data Wrappers for PostgreSQL in Python. To install Multicorn on RHEL6 the following is needed: PostgreSQL 9.2 Python 2.7 make, GCC, etc. Installing PostgreSQL 9.2 is easy as it's available in the PostgreSQL Yum repository . Unfortunately Python 2.7 is not included in RHEL6. And replacing the 'system' python is a bad idea. The solution is to do an 'altinstall' of Python. The "--shared" and ucs4 options are required. The altinstall will install a python binary with the name python2.7 instead of just python. This allows you to have multiple python versions on 1 system. wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.3/Python-2.7.3.tgz tar zxf Python-2.7.3.tgz cd Python-2.7.3 ./configure --shared --enable-unicode=ucs4 make make altinstall This will result in a /usr/local/bin/python2.7 which doesn't work. This is due to the fact that the libraries are installed /usr/local/lib, which is...

Yesterday I blogged about some issues with MySQL Workbench. The problem was that CentOS 5.5 is not supported. So I installed RHEL6, one of the best known Enterprise Linux distributions. It's a 30 day evaluation, but that should be sufficient. After some minor issues with VirtualBox I had a working installation. So I tried to install MySQL Workbench again. I used 'sudo yum localinstall mysql-workbench-gpl-5.2.31a-2el6.x86_64.rpm' which failed because of 2 unmet dependencies: pexpect and libzip.so.1 There is already a bug report in RHEL for the missing pexpect: # 652659 I used the RHEL6 installation DVD to install pexpect. There is a closed/wont-fix bug ( #54403 ) for the libzip.so.1 dependency. It turns out that libzip is in the "RHEL Server Optional" channel. RHN should be used to enable more channels, but apparently the optional channel is not part of the evaluation license, so I used the web interface to download and install the libzip RPM. The wo...