One of our customer had an Oracle database running on Redhat so I had to install Oracle on a linux environment to emulate theirs. I chose to try that on Debian since that is the one I am most familiar with, and Suse since that is closer to what they are actually using (and Suse is supported by Oracle… well not the perso version of course but at least that will be closer to it). I never got Redhat to work satisfactorily before so I figure I might as well not waste my time with that one.

Linux installed OK on VMWare at first glance but what a pain it is to run on VMWare. It is terribly slow and running anything CPU intensive renders the whole system unresponsive. Keyboard and mouse often behaves erratically. This seemed to be worse on Suse than on Debian, probably because KDE is more resource hungry than fluxbox my usual WM on Debian. Other than that I have to say Suse was pretty neat. The configuration interface was not too bad to use, after 1 year without messing much with Linux I had a hard time finding some of the config on Debian (though it was still faster than messing with the GUI).

Got Oracle 9i (9.0.4.0) to install OK on Linux (Suse 9). I had to download some orarun package from a Suse ftp site, it includes a library without which oracle installer crashes, then set a few environment variables, and it worked as is (using the JRE provided). I gave up setting it up on Debian though I would assume it is possible to copy the library and use that one. With some work I can probably set up an alternate WM on Suse anyway.
When creating the database I had to edit dbca and add -native to the line that launches the JRE. The first time I chose the database name “default” (how smart), and it came up with ORA-12909: TEMPORARY keyword expected. I changed the name and it worked fine.

Next challenge = connect to the database. I tried simply launching sqlplus and got the error “ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist”. Well oracle DB was not started, so I guess it doesnt. Now I moved oracle home to /opt/oracle which is the directory expected by the stock Suse scripts and edited those scripts to enable the DB startup. I had to edit the /etc/oratab file to enable the startup of my test db, and also I had to copy the init file – for some reason it was left under /opt/oracle/admin and had to be copied under /opt/oracle/product/9ir2/inittestdb.ora. I was finally able to connect with SQL Plus, I had to use the username scott/tiger (the sys/masterkey that I set up during the install did not work, not sure why there heh).