I just spent the better part of a whole weekend attempting to get Oracle running on my RedHat Linux 7.2 laptop. In short, it was a big pain. What bothered me most about the whole ordeal is the lack of support that I found. I found quite a few articles on the subject, but none was clear and concise. Each had part of the subject covered, but none had the whole picture or the correct order. I hope what follows will help the rest of you.

If you want to skip the intro and just see the actual steps I took, click here

Allow me to start at the beginning. I am a sysadmin/network admin supporting Linux & Unix environments. I am used to working for companies that can afford their own DBAs and I only venture into the DB world as far as it relates to working with a DBA to optimize a server (or to provide temporary root access while the DBA is doing something). Recently, my company laid off a large chunk of it’s employees in an attempt to stay alive. One of those to go was our DBA, leaving us with myself and a perl programmer with some basic database skills, though mostly on mySQL. I thought it best that I learn a bit quickly and try to pick up some basic DBA skills. I started by buying a copy of Osborne Press’ Oracle 8i for Linux Starter Kit by Steve Bobrowski. I chose this book despite it being close to three years old because it covers Oracle 8i (8.1.6) on Linux which is the environment my company uses.

I started out following the steps laid out in the first chapter regarding installation of Oracle on Linux, but didn’t get very far at all. I set up the oracle user and dba group, etc, but couldn’t get the installer to start. Instead all I got was a hung ‘jre’ process taking up 98% of my CPU. I eventually got this issue resolved, and was able to get the installer to run and actually bring up the Oracle Universal Installer. However, during the ‘linking’ process of the installation I kept getting errors in various files ending in ‘.mk’ (make files I am assuming). I chose to ignore the errors, but when I then tried to start sqlplus, it errored out with library errors (I later learned this had to do with compilation errors with glibc22 when Oracle was expecting glibc21). I was able to get around this with some environment variables in Oracle’s ‘.bash_profile’, but was now faced with a new problem. When the installer got to the part where it creates the initial db, it timed out and hung at 80%. At this point I decided to try some different Oracle versions to see if the newer ones had been updated to handle glibc22. In a nutshell the answer was no. I tried 8.1.7 and 9i… both failed with errors during the linking process in various .mk files. Using the same environment variables I used for the 8.1.6 install, I was able to get past the .mk file errors, but experienced the same hanging 80% of the way into the db creation. For the record, I believe this problem doesn’t occur if you choose a custom install and don’t create an initial database. However, this is only what I gather from reading on the web; I didn’t actually try installing without creating a db. I didn’t experience the db creation hang when installing 9i since I hadn’t even gotten past the .mk file errors at the time.

Below are the steps I took to get Oracle 8.1.6 installed on my machine. The steps themselves are numbered (1,2,3, etc). Examples are begun and ended with < and > respectively. Notes typically follow instructions and are preceeded with a dash ( - ). Please note that the instructions below are what worked for me. I have tried to be as concise as possible so that any reader of this document could get Oracle 8i or 9i installed on Linux, but I don’t profess to know everything. As such you may not need to do everything I do below, or you may need to make a few additions. This doc assumes that oracle will be installed in /usr/oracle. I HIGHLY recommend you read all the installation steps once prior to starting… especially the part towards the bottom about the ‘stubs’ script.

Pre-Installation:

1) Create three groups for Oracle to use
<groupadd sysdba>
<groupadd sysoper>
<groupadd oinstall>

2) Create the Oracle user
<useradd oracle –d /usr/oracle –g oinstall –G sysdba,sysoper>

3) Set the Oracle user’s password
<passwd oracle>

- (you’ll be prompted to enter the password twice)

4) Set permissions on Oracle’s home/base directory
<chmod 755>

5) Create the Oracle base installation directory
<cd /usr>
<mkdir oraInventory>
<chown oracle.oinstall oraInventory>

6) Verify that umask is correct for the Oracle user
<su - oracle>
<umask>

- You should see 022. If not, check out the man page for your distribution and learn how to set the umask to 022

7) Set the environment for the Oracle user

- Oracle documentation says to add the following to your .bash_profile (or similar file for your shell)

Unset LANG

- Not sure why this is necessary, only that many articles recommended it and I believe it is required for non-English based installs. Don’t worry though… the Oracle installer defaults to American English.

DISPLAY=localhost:0.0; export DISPLAY

- Nothing special… just tells X-based apps to use the local display for output

ORACLE_BASE=/usr/oraInventory; export ORACLE_BASE

- This is unique to each install, but shouldn’t ever need to be very large

ORACLE_HOME=/usr/oracle; export ORACLE_HOME

- Up to the individual install; most DBAs follow the typical U01, U02, U03, etc file systems for Oracle related files with /U01 being the oracle user’s home directory

ORACLE_SID=oralin; export ORACLE_SID

- My personal… derived from ORAcle for LINux

PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin; export PATH

- After much reading and troubleshooting, I also discovered that the following need to be added to Oracle’s .bash_profile (or similar file for your shell)

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5; export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL

- I’m not sure of the technical reasons behind the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL setting, but I believe it has something to do with Java. Oracle uses it’s own JRE, but Netscape documentation says to make the same setting to the netscape startup files for Netscape 6 if you encounter errors and hangs on sites that use java. I had lots of java-related crashes with NS6 until I added this setting to my netscape startup file. Since then I haven’t had an hangs or other issues.

LDEMULATION=elf_i386_glibc21; export LDEMULATION
GCC_EXEC_PREFIX=/usr/i386-glibc21-linux/lib/gcc-lib; export GCC_EXEC_PREFIX

- This addition is what fixed the errors in the .mk files mentioned previously

- If you plan to use any JDBC related stuff, add the following options now and save yourself heartache later

CLASSPATH=.:ORACLE_HOME/jdbc/lib/classes111.zip; export CLASSPATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:/lib:/usr/lib:$ORACLE_HOME/jdbc/lib:$ORACLE_HOME/ctx/lib; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

8) Next, make sure that you have the following packages installed (packages can be found on the RedHat 7.1 or 7.2 CD #2:

- Compat-libstdc++_6.2-2.9.0.16
- Compat-glibc-6.2-2.1.3.2
- Compat-egcs-c++-6.2-1.1.2.16
- Compat-libs-6.2-3
- Compat-egcs-6.2-1.1.2.16
- Compat-egcs-objc-6.2-1.1.2.16

- Some docs recommended that you also have binutils-2.10.91.0.2-3. I didn’t personally find this necessary, but it can’t hurt to remove any newer version you may have, install binutils-2.10.91.0.2-3, then go back to the newer version after the installation is complete.

9) While the directories don’t exist yet, it’s also good to add two directory entries to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig

- Edit /etc/ld.so.conf and add the following to the bottom of the file:

/usr/oracle/lib (i.e. $ORACLE_HOME/lib)
/usr/oracle/network/lib (i.e. $ORACLE_HOME/network/lib)
</sbin/ldconfig –v>

10) If you are planning to install Oracle 8.1.7, I have one other recommendation, though I don’t believe it is a requirement. During the installation of 8.1.7, the installer will ask for the location of a local JRE. It defaults to /usr/local/java. Many of the articles I saw on the internet recommend that a local java be installed prior to this. I was able to skip this option and don’t appear to have suffered any problems, though installing it can’t hurt and may prohibit problems. So if you’d like to continue with this optional steps, instructions are below:

- Download Blackdown’s jdk-1.1.8_v3 from ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/linux/devel/lang/java/blackdown.org/JDK-1.1.8/i386/v3/

- Install Blackdown’s JDK-1.1.8

<tar –xvjf jdk~~~~~.tar.bz2 –C /urs/local

- Link the jdk to /usr/local/java

<ln –s /usr/local/jdk118_v3 /usr/local/java

11) The final pre-installation step related to the glibc21 vs glibc22 issues. Basically the oracle media requires glibc21 to work properly. Newer versions of Linux, specifically RedHat 7.1 & 7.2 include glibc22. I don’t pretend to know all the reasons why, but I do know that Oracle recognizes the problem and has released a patch to aid in installation. According to many articles I have read, this patch will resolve the errors with the .mk files mentioned earlier in the document as well as the database hang issue during the database installation. DO NOT simply try to install glibc21. I attempted this… first I tried to have both glibc21 and glibc22 on my system, then I tried just glibc21. There are too many dependencies on glibc22 in RedHat 7.1 and newer. Immediately, Netscape and Gnome failed. If you work in an X-Windows environment, I highly recommend NOT trying to downgrade to glibc21 as an alternative.

- Download glibc-2.1.3-stubs.tar.gz from http://download.oracle.com/otn/linux/oracle8i/glibc-2.1.3-stubs.tar.gz

- DO NOT include the location of the extracted stubs file(s) in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

- Extract the stubs archive to $ORACLE_HOME (/usr/oracle in our example).

<tar –xvzf glibc-2.1.3-stubs.tar.gz –C /usr/oracle>

*** Please note that you will need a valid user ID for the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) before you can download the stubs file. You can get an UserID for OTN at:
http://otn.oracle.com/admin/account/membership.html

Installation:

1) become oracle with oracle’s environment variables
<su – oracle>

2) mount the cdrom (this assumes that /etc/fstab is already set up for all users to access the CD and that it mounts to /mnt/cdrom)
<mount /mnt/cdrom>

3) from Oracle’s home directory, start the Oracle installer
</mnt/cdrom/runInstaller>

- If everything has been set up correctly and depending on the speed of your system, you should see the Oracle Universal Installer. For me, this proved to be a critical step that I missed repeatedly. I kept becoming oracle then cd’ing into /mnt/cdrom, then running ‘./runInstaller’. It turns out that need to be oracle in oracle’s home directory and to run the installer from the full path as described above.

4) Enter the various information for your installation and click on next til you get to the summary screen. If you follow the example I have set you should enter the following:

- File Locations should be the default: (/mnt/cdrom/stage/products.jar)
- Path: /usr/oracle
- UNIX Group Name: oinstall
- Choose Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition
- Choose Typical installation type
- Database Administrator: sysdba
- Database Operator: sysoper
- Global Database Name: oralin.yourdomain.com (substitute your domain suffix)
- SID: oralin
- Directory for Database files: /usr/oracle

*** Note that during the configuration process, Oracle may prompt you with a window telling you to run something as root. Follow the instructions provided (which are basically to open a shell, become root, run a script, and exit the shell then click on Next or Retry… or whatever is appropriate).

5) On the summary screen and BEFORE you click on INSTALL, open another shell and become oracle

<su – oracle>

In the shell, change directory to $ORACLE_HOME (/usr/oracle).

<cd /usr/oracle>

A quick ‘ls’ should reveal a file called ‘setup_stubs.sh’.

<ls –als> … <setup_stubs.sh>

The installer shows a progress bar that goes from 1% to 100%. It hits the 100% after all the files are copied and BEFORE the files are linked. However, there is no prompt to continue, etc after files are copied and before ‘linking’… the installer simply finishes copying the files, then moves on to linking. The ‘setup_stubs.sh’ script needs to be run BEFORE linking.

6) With an extra shell open, click on INSTALL (or Next depending on the version of the Installer). Carefull watch the progress bar. When it hits 95%, in the other shell, as oracle, run <./setup_stubs.sh>. This will produce some varied output basically saying that files were checked and re-linked (linked to glibc21 not glibc22).

7) When ‘setup_stubs.sh’ is done, you can close the shell. The Oracle installer may ask you run another script as root. Do so, and go on with the installation. The script will likely be called ‘root.sh’. Before running the script, as root, edit line 102 and confirm that it reads ‘RMF=”/bin/rm –f’ “ and NOT ‘RMF=/bin/rm –f’. If it looks like the latter, change it to read ‘RMF=”/bin/rm –rf” ’

8) At this point, Oracle should be installed, and starter DB should be created, and tools like sqlplus should work just fine.

In summary, this doc may be a bit of overkill, but it’s what I had to do to get Oracle installed. With Oracle’s recent announcement that they are converting all their backend machines to the Linux platform, hopefully the installation processes for Linux will improve. If you find errors, anomalies, or inconsistencies in this doc, please feel free to report them to me at andrew@nccomp.com. I tested this installation on 4 different machines with Oracle 8.1.6 and Oracle 8.1.7. I didn’t fully test Oracle 9i, but mostly cause a base install of Oracle 9i on Linux needs 1.3Gb, while Oracle 8i only needs approx. 500Mb. I have been told that the 9i install will work with the instructions above, though I have received conflicting information about whether or not the stubs patch is needed for a 9i install. Check back and I’m sure you’ll find that I’ve updated this to include any relevant 9i installation issues.

Also, if you’re reading this, I will assume that you are new to Oracle or at least to Oracle on Linux. Here’s a quick FYI, after an installation neither the database nor a listener will start automatically. The default configuration will also be for dedicated connections, not multi-threaded connections. I will update this doc shortly to including system startup/shutdown scripts and for info on making Oracle run multi-threaded.

Reference Articles - Links:
http://www.learninglinux.com/article.php?sid=44
http://staff.in2.hr/denis/oracle/817install_rh72_en.html
Oracle 8i for Linux Starter Kit by Steve Bobrowski, Osborne – McGrawHill – Oracle Press
http://www.osborne.com