Oracle and Open Source

Installing Oracle8i on Linux

If you’ve never installed Oracle before, the Linux installation will be only one of the many things you need to learn about. The OTN provides a wide variety of documentation on installing and using the Oracle database and its many associated tools. Spend the necessary time getting up to speed before you begin with the Linux installation. On the other hand, if you have previous experience installing Oracle on other versions of Unix, you’ll find that a Linux-based installation is pretty much the same.

Before getting started with this installation process, make sure to read the release notes and README files. This may seem rather obvious advice, but take it seriously. On some other systems, you might be able to get away with skipping this step, but don’t overlook it here: some parts of the Linux installation are not at all obvious. With some versions of Linux, for example, a glibc patch is needed, because new releases of Linux (containing an updated and changed glibc library) often come out faster than the corresponding Oracle releases.^[60] Essentially, a set of compatibility libraries is installed to provide the old interface and include files, and then Oracle’s patch merely relinks its various executables through that library compatibility layer. This description might sound somewhat cryptic, but if you read through the release notes and check your version of glibc to see if it applies to your versions of Oracle and Linux, all should become clear.

Once ...