At some point last year I was completely over the stuffing around with Redhat (or Fedora) and tried Debian. That was a nightmare as well, the install hanging with no idea as to why.
So I asked my friendly unix team what they would recommend and use, and they mentioned Ubuntu which is debian distribution but nicer for dumb installers like me (yeh like I have never installed unix before)
So I grabbed a copy of the CD and installed no problems. Devices all found and very clean feel.
Rant: I am over any OS (including Windows XP) showing too much of the complexity to the user. Whilst I can jump thru the hoops, after a couple of rounds I am over the whole process and want something which just works properly. Ubuntu does just that.
Ok now to install Oracle XE. After playing around with MySQL, I decided to grab Oracle XE and install. This was NOT straight forward.
I found two good blog articles about installing Oracle XE on Ubuntu. However I had to combine both.
- Check how much space is on / using df -k. I didn't have enough space so I needed to make a symbolic link to somewhere else. This actually makes sense anyway as installing Oracle software in /usr/lib/oracle is not something you want to do with oracle anyway. On our enterprise boxes the software is on a separate partition/filesystem, either in /home/oracle/product/... or /oracle/product/... So the command is: sudo ln -s /home/oracle /usr/lib/oracle
- This article covers the install mostly.
- Whilst apt-get might work I had to go and download and install libaio1 and libc6. I got them from Ubuntu Packages. Use dpkg -i to install both packages.
- This article also covers how to add extra swap if the installer complains. I had to add additional swap space.
- Run the converted rpm file as per article in step 2.
Have Fun
Paul
