The short story is that if you have a standard configuration things should work entirely as you’d expect. That is, download the archive which, these days, comes as a RedHat “rpm” file. Become “root” and enter “rpm -ivh oracle-xe.rpm” and wait a bit. The install goes away and creates all the required users, starts up the listener and creates a default empty database.

CentOS, for those that have not come across it, is a Linux operating system built from the same source package as RedHat Enterprise Linux but without the support contract.

This HOWTO business has got slightly out of hand! There are so many different versions of Oracle and Linux that I’ve been forced to do a little restructuring.

This table should explain the documents that you need. Generally you need the main HOWTO (to answer any questions you might have) and the errata. If you know what you’re doing you might be able to get away with just the errata.

This is the official home page for my Oracle on Linux HOWTO.

The current version is 1.18 and was released on 19 July 2003. It’s been a long time — nearly a year — since the last release which may lead you to conclude that it’s a major update. You would be wrong! I’ve added some text about “how to ignore that this document is out of date” and a few clarifications. (This may sound lazy, but it’s not possible to keep it completely up to date.) This update is mainly for the Linux Documentation Project rather than people that come here.

v1.18, 19 July 2003

With this HOWTO, and a little luck, you will be able to get “Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition for Linux” installed, create a database and connect to it from a remote machine. The main focus of this guide is RedHat Linux 6.0 and Oracle 8.1.5, although it should work well for other recent distributions and more stable versions of Oracle.

## 1. Introduction

## 1.1. What’s in here?

Linux is well known for being difficult and, generally, user hostile. Being a bit of a Unix fan I’m not sure whether I agree with that or not.

Prerequisites

Oracle 9i is the result of merging almost their entire product line into two products. To say that 9i is the database is a little misleading, but this is what you need if you want to keep current with your Oracle database.

There are a few things that you need to be aware of before embarking on the installation of Oracle 9i. First are it’s hardware requirements. They’re huge, much more than 8i which itself was large.

In all honesty, I’ve not managed to get Oracle working properly yet. When I upgraded my RedHat 7 machine to 8 it still worked, when I installed it from scratch it didn’t. This clearly shows that it’s possible to get Oracle 8i working, but I can’t say how!

For those that are interested, I found that it was easy to get the installer to complete, but I get the infamous “end of communication channel” error when trying to start an instance.

I have recently installed Oracle 8i R3 (8.1.7) on my Celeron 466 machine. I found the installation to be very straight-forward compared with both 8.1.5 and the experiences of many people.

My machine is well below the specification that would be required to do real work on, especially if you have a number of developers. It does work, albeit rather slowly. Creating my initial database, for example, took around eight hours.

Introduction

The subject at hand is really much wider than just Redhat 7.x, especially as more recent distributions are following Redhats lead and are now including glibc 2.2 also. I have no reason to believe that this process will not work with newer versions of SuSE, Debian, etc.

The other point to note is that I have not tried the procedure outlined here. I have migrated my box from Debian 2.2 to RedHat 7.2 and can testify that Oracle still works, but I have not actually performed an installation. I have, however, recieved a good number of emails confirming that it works, so don’t worry!

# Introduction

Everyone will be very pleased to hear that Oracle’s third attempt at producing a usable database product on Linux has largely been successful. The first two usually worked but only after much aggravation. Forget all the extras that 8.1.6 provides, you can get the thing installed with much less grief!

Of course, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it was simple and straight-forward all the time. It is Oracle that we’re talking about here.