Oracle Database 10g Installation on Linux: some observations

Hello all,

I'm just here to share my experience as I install Oracle Database 10g on Fedora Core 3 Linux (which is taking quite a long time, hence this message)...

Having downloaded Oracle 10g Database (filename: ship.db.lnx32.cpio.gz)
from http://otn.oracle.com/ the files extract to a directory called Disk1
which among other things contains installation instructions for Oracle Database 10g in an HTML file called welcome.htm. This file warrants the
creation of two Unix groups called oinstall and dba and a Unix oracle account called oracle. The installation must then be carried out as user oracle (except for a script which must be run as root once prompted
to do so in the middle of the installation; it is not possible to install
the whole thing as root). Both the download and installation process can be
quite slow. One of the requirements for installation was 512MB of RAM but
I was able to get away with 256MB. My hard drive never made so much noise
before as when I installed Oracle Database 10g. Not even when installing
Fedora Core 3 Linux did the hard drive heads make so much scratching. It must be because my PIII system does not meet the memory requirements
and as a result there is a whole lot of swapping between memory and disk,
which causes all the noise in the hard drive and the whole system to start
thrashing...

Once done with this installation I am going to carry on with my JDeveloper
installation from Oracle, cause I could not install it without having Oracle
Database installed it seems. It was complaining about ORACLE_HOME not set,
so I decided to install Oracle Database 10g first.

I've already installed the latest J2EE from j2eesdk-1_4_2004Q4-beta-linux.bin
from the java.sun.com site. It extracts to a default location called
/opt/SUNWappserver. I don't know why they couldn't choose a better
name. I ended up adding the following directives to my ~/.bashrc in order to use Sun's javac and java commands instead of the only partially functional (in terms of library support) javac command which comes with some RedHat systems from another package (FC3 does not have them though).

export JAVA_HOME=/opt/SUNWappserver/jdk
export CLASSPATH=/opt/SUNWappserver/jdk/bin export PATH=/opt/SUNWappserver/jdk/bin:$PATH

Even better these could have been placed in .sh and .csh scripts under /etc/profile.d/ since other users (for example, the oracle user used to install oracle) then need these shell variables to be exported into their environment as well (for example, the oracle user needs them to run the runInstaller script which uses Java Swing for the install wizard).

Anyways, RedHat/Fedora always seems to come with poor support for Java (and no Oracle support, well, that's cause it's payware), but it would be nice to have nice RPMs for these files.

Installing Oracle with an RPM command would have been cool and easy. The problem is, since the installation process seems to be GUI based, it doesn't seem possible to me to create RPMs, especially since it also
stops in the middle asking you to then run a script as root, with a dialog
box right in the middle of the installation process.

I wonder if anyone knows whether it is possible at all to create an RPM
from the oracle cpio.gz database sources? It would really simplify the unnecessarily tedious and long installation process...

The whole thing just finished: it even created the following database:

Global Database Name: orcl
System Identifier (SID): orcl
Server Parameter Filename: /usr/local/oracle/product/

                           10.1.0/Db_2/dbms/spfileorcl.ora

(not sure wha the Db_2 is doing in that path name, almost makes it look
like a product from IBM, which obviously it isn't).

Anyways, my install is almost complete, here we go, another request to run yet a second script as root:

$ su
Password:
$ /usr/local/oracle/product/10.1.0/Db_2/root.sh Running Oracle10 root.sh script...
\nThe following environment variables are set as:

    ORACLE_OWNER= oracle
    ORACLE_HOME= /usr/local/oracle/product/10.1.0/Db_2

Enter the full pathname of the local bin directory: [/usr/local/bin]:

   Copying dbhome to /usr/local/bin ...
   Copying oraenv to /usr/local/bin ...
   Copying coraenv to /usr/local/bin ...

\nCreating /etc/oratab file...
Adding entry to /etc/oratab file...
Entries will be added to the /etc/oratab file as needed by Database Configuration Assistant when a database is created Finished running generic part of root.sh script. Now product-specific root actions will be performed.
/var/opt/oracle does not exist. Creating it now.
/etc/oracle does not exist. Creating it now.
Successfully accumulated necessary OCR keys. Creating OCR keys for user 'root', privgrp 'root'.. Operation successful.
Oracle Cluster Registry for cluster has been initialized

Adding to inittab
Checking the status of Oracle init process... Expecting the CRS daemons to be up within 600 seconds. CSS is active on these nodes.

        s01060080c6fd1f22
CSS is active on all nodes.
Oracle CSS service is installed and running under init(1M) $

Ha! So finally I know what to set the ORACLE_HOME environment variable to
so that I can install JDeveloper... and I even get the following J2EE applications deployed... hmm...

The following J2EE Applications have been deployed and are accessible at the URLs listed below.

Ultra Search URL:
http://foo.net:5620/ultrasearch

Ultra Search Administration Tool URL:
http://foo.net:5620/ultrasearch/admin

iSQL*Plus URL:
http://foo.net:5560/isqlplus

iSQL*Plus DBA URL:
http://foo.net:5560/isqlplus/dba

Enteprise Manager 10g Database Control URL: http://S01060080c6fd1f22.ed.shawcable.net:5500/em

Anyways, installation is finally complete...

I guess I want to try out the grid computing features, so I will choose enterprise edition... didn't I already go through these screens though???? I guess I'm done.

Thank you for reading,

Best Regards,

Neil Received on Sat Dec 25 2004 - 14:55:19 CST