Whenever a question comes up that I can't answer my first thought is google it. Google is now a verb as well as a noun.

This week, however, the power of Google has failed me twice.

I've been using NetBeans 4.1 for a few weeks now and have become a major convert to the power of this tool. It really does make writing code easier. However, I was working on some code that used JMF and ran into a problem: native code libraries for the runtime enviroment. From a shell I can set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH (obviously this is Linux, Windows just isn't an option as a developement platform to me). In NetBeans, there seems to be no way to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH for an application. A bit of searching on Google reminded me that -Djava.library.path should do the same thing. Sadly, this didn't work, either from witin NetBeans or from the command line. This perplexed me and I was at a bit of a loss to see how to get this to work within NetBeans. I consulted a friend and he suggested updating the /etc/ld.so.conf. Adding the appropriate line to this file and running ldconfig and voila! JMF runs from within NetBeans.

The second Google failure was for my shiny new Acer Ferrari laptop. I wanted to have three OSs installed on it, XP (for those rare occasions), Linux and Solaris. XP was pretty straightforward once I'd recreated the partitions. Solaris was also a breeze thanks to all the work done by some of the Solaris engineering team to make this probably the best supported laptop on Solaris. Linux, however, proved to be considerably more tricky. At first I tried a version that had an early 2.6 kernel. This didn't really work too well since the ethernet port and built in USB hub clashed IRQs and neither would work. Then I upgraded to SuSE 9.3 which had a 2.6.11 kernel. Things looked much better as the mouse started working, but the network, despite succesfully getting an IP address via DHCP, stubbornly refused to send packets anywhere. A search on google didn't help and it was once again talking to someone familiar with this that revealed I needed to add apm=off acpi=no irq to the boot options.

It appears that Google is still a long way off from indexing the whole of mankind's knowledge (which may actually be not such a bad thing).