Installing Oracle XE in openSUSE 11.3

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Installing Oracle XE in openSUSE 11.3 is pretty straight-forward except for one gotcha which I'll cover below. If you look at the openSUSE forums you will find posts like this one that make it sound complicated but it's actually much easier then it is made out to be. Here are the steps I use:

• Start Yast and open the software management, make sure you have libaio and glibc installed. If you are running the 64 bit version of openSUSE make sure that the 32 bit version of these libraries is also installed.
• Download the Oracle XE 10g rpm from here http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/express-edition/downloads/index.html.
• Install the rpm using the command sudo rpm -ivh oracle-xe-univ-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm, note the oracle xe rpm file name may have changed so put the right one here.
• After you install the package some of the post-install scripts will fail because openSUSE is more stringent now in package requirements. As a result we need to set the password for the oracle user manually. To do this, su to root and then type in passwd oracle and change the password to whatever you wish.
• Once you do that, while still the root user run the command /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure to configure the database. Follow the prompts and enter the information as necessary.
• The database should have been started automatically once the configuration is complete, run ps -ef|grep oracle to check the Oracle processes are running. You should see the TNS listener process as well as a bunch of database processes.

That's all it takes to install Oracle XE on openSUSE, simple eh? Note that openSUSE is not an officially supported platform for Oracle XE, while I find it runs fine for development I would not recommend openSUSE for hosting a production Oracle database.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 3:40 PM | Categories: Linux | Permalink