Oracle 9i on Debian Woody installation notes
--------------------------------------------

These are my personal notes on installing Oracle 9i (9.2.0.1) on Debian
Woody (3.0r1).  I have an existing Oracle8i database on Solaris 8 (x86)
that I will be exporting/re-importing into this machine. As such, I will
not be creating a database during the install.

NOTE: It goes without saying, but Debian is not a certified platform
for Oracle 9i (yes, it's sad and frustrating, but only the expensive
"Enterprise" versions of some distros are certified.)  Your support
options may be limited with this setup. Though, my issues in the past 10
years that required calling Oracle tech support were rarely (if ever?)
issues with the underlying OS. They were almost always bugs in the Oracle
RDBMS engine that required patches from Oracle.  If you know linux well
enough, I'm sure you can fudge your way around Tech Support should the
need arise. However, you have been warned.  If you have require a 24x7
environment, run a certified setup!!!


INSTALLING ORACLE RDBMS
-----------------------

I began with a base install of Debian Woody, with the kernel image updated
to 2.4.18.

 # addgroup dba
 # adduser --group dba oracle
 # apt-get install libstdc++2.10
 # ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-2.so.3 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2
 # mount /dev/cdrom /mnt

This is enough to get Oracle installer to run. I also did the following as I
want to install the software into /opt/oracle9i instead of /home/oracle. This
was a personal decision. YMMV.

 # mkdir /opt/oracle9i
 # chown oracle.dba /opt/oracle9i


Then, as oracle:
 $  cd /mnt; ./runInstaller

When asked about base directory, enter:
    /opt/oracle9i/

When asked about Destination (Oracle home), enter:
    /opt/oracle9i/orahome/

At one point, the installation complained about setting file permissions.
I had to do the following manually at those points:

 $ touch /opt/oracle9i/orahome/oracle.swd.jre/bin/i686/native_threads/.extract_args
 $ touch /opt/oracle9i/orahome/oracle.swd.jre/bin/i686/green_threads/.extract_args
 $ touch /opt/oracle9i/orahome/oracle.swd.jre/bin/.java_wrapper

I'm not sure if that'll bite me later on or not. I don't use embedded java
(can we say "Yuck!",) so I can't see where that will become an issue.

After Oracle has relinked, it will ask you to run /opt/oracle9i/orahome/root.sh.
Edit this file and change the line that reads:
  AWK=/bin/awk
to:
  AWK=/usr/bin/awk

Then run it as root. 


----
Jason Cater
jason@ncsmags.com