Howto Install Oracle on Linux (techdoc)

Precursor: there is an installation guide for linux right there on OTN (Oracle Technical Network). Do download it and keep it open in the background - it shows the correct order of steps, I will just add some hints to it

• Download the installation tarballs:
  Just register on OTN, the download is free. Unpack with:

     gunzip ship.....cpio.gz
     cpio -idmv < ...cpio 

• I was installing to "opt/oracle", so one of the scripts to be run as "root" was

     /opt/oracle/app/oracle/oraInventory/orainst/...
  

  After that you have a new file /etc/oraInst.loc

• When checking for the system requirements you will notice that almost all settings have to be done. Just do not bother for long and fixate all values by doing cut-and-paste into

  cat > /etc/sysctl.conf
  # Oracle10g requirements
  kernel.shmall = 2097152
  kernel.shmmax = 1073741824
  kernel.shmmni = 4096
  kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
  fs.file-max = 65536
  net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000
  

  (Press Ctrl-D to end the cat-into-file)

  Wait! This is wrong! You will notice later that the installation will fail - reason: shmmax is too low (I did choose the double of 512MB being installed in my system). Always use a shmmax being atleast 2giga (2147483648) no matter what the installation guide says.

  By the way, the server will run on "localhost:5500/em"

• The next script to be run will be

  /opt/oracle/app/oracle/product/10.1.0/Db.1/rootsh 

  As a result it will add some scripts into "/usr/local/bin" and it will add an entry in "/etc/inittab". Remove that inittab entry! It is wrong for a desktop system to start / restart the oracle database via inittab (we will do that later with an rc.d script that can be switched on/off via runlevel or manually).

• Here is may Suse 9.2 rc.d init.d service script (note that I did choose a different installation path after trying to install a second time):

  /etc/init.d/oracle10g

  Suse will do the rest later.