Learn the basics of installing Oracle Database 10g on RHEL 2.1, RHEL 3, or SLES 8, from the bare metal up.
Installing Oracle Database 10g on Linux x86
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Eugenia Loli
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Learn how to install Oracle 10g on a non-supported platform, such as Fedora: http://staff.in2.hr/denis/oracle/10g1install_fedora1_en.html
It’s not as stupid as it sounds. If you want to use an Oracle client or the client libraries on a non-supported platform you’ll pretty much need to install all of Oracle, and that means essentially fooling the installer and making your system as much like Redhat ALS/ELS as possible. Doing that on Fedora isn’t too hard but it was certainly non-trivial when all you want to do is compile DBI::Oracle for Perl. I wouldn’t recomend running a production database on a non-supported platform though.
I can vouch for those instructions for Fedora, as we did it just last week. It wasn’t even that painful, but if it wern’t for that damned Oracle Universal Installer it’s be a lot less painful, that’s for sure.
For another good site: http://www.puschitz.com/
I have installed various versions of Oracle under various operating systems a number of times (including Linux, Solaris, and NT).
Frankly, I’m flabbergasted by the dismal packaging and installation. It’s gotten better, but they still make all sorts of pieces unnecessarily manual. If you want to install just the libraries and such for Linux or Solaris, you have to go through the heavy install and load up a bunch of useless crud.
Using an unsupported version of Linux? Solaris? There are a plethora of environment variables you need to set, and chunks of code that need to be compiled, yet this rarely works because they make all sorts of dim-witted mistakes in the procedure. Basically, they don’t take time to work out the installation procedure.
Compare it to other database products. Oracle has the worst installation and setup practices of any I can think of.
Agreed! Installing OpenBSD from scratch and configuring X by hand is child’s play compared to the nightmare that installing Oracle on Linux. Hell, it’s hard just install it on supported versions of Linux.
I’ve found that 10g on a supported platform works totally smoothly. I’ve installed it perhaps a half dozen times and its worked quite well for me. I did install it on an unsupported platform (Gentoo), and that actually worked fine once I tricked the installer into believing it was redhat. (I believe i put some version information in /etc to make it happy.)
When I compare this to 9i.. or god help you.. 8.. its tons better.
I do wish that they would.. 1… make a cleaner software packager. OUI (Oracle Universal Installer) is clunky on a good day.. and its not usually a good day. And 2, it would be nice to have a simple tar.gz/rpm for the OCI libraries.. I usually just tar them off a server where I’ve installed the server though.
Of course.. mysql is even easier to install..
Depends on your needs I guess..
I’d like the Oracle 10g CDs/DVD to come with RPMs for the supported platforms (e.g. RHEL3, SLES8, RHEL2.1) where you just do an “rpm -Uvh” on them and it’ll spit out the dependency RPMs that need to be on the system. Install those deps, re-run “rpm -Uvh” and it should install everything, including the rc runlevel stuff, the /proc config settings, creating oracle/dba/oinstall users/groups, relinking binaries if necessary and so on (i.e. all the ludicrously manual rubbish we currently have to do!).
At the moment, there’s a bleeding annoying Java GUI installer (to keep it cross-platform) for installing Oracle *server* software, which is utterly ludicrous (because most Linux/Unix Oracle servers will run with at most a text console). However, this Oracle install guide fell into the trap of saying you should install the bloatedness of X, Gnome *and* KDE on your Oracle server. Er, no, you actually ssh into your “init level 3 text console only server” and use X11 forwarding to run the installer pointing back to a Linux desktop. That way you won’t need to install 100’s of MB’s of needless packages (and you might not have a card capable of supporting X on your server either…).
This combination works just fine:
SuSE SLES 8 with Service Pack 3
kernel-2.4.21-251
oracles ocsf filesystem for that kernel version
oracles asm form that kernel version
The installer runs smooth.
But is it really cool that a perl script starts a
java program
btw: 10g is started from inittab like a getty
i forgott to mention that RAC is name of the game.
Its now fully supported with SLES