Gladstone – An Oracle installation script

59 Replies

I only have twenty-nine 150GB-plus databases to manage these days, and most of those are running on servers with uptimes in excess of a year (it would have been longer, but I only got them to switch to Linux about 13 months ago). I don’t, therefore, tend to do a lot of Oracle installations these days -and my automated pre-installation configuration shell script which used to make the job fairly easy has therefore languished of late.

That automated script initially went by the name of ‘Doris‘ (for “Dizwell/Oracle Reliable Installation Script”), a name which appears to have stuck in some quarters.

About a year after Doris appeared, I re-wrote it (and updated it) to use Gnome GUI pop-ups and other interactive elements and accordingly re-named it ‘GOAL‘ (for “Graphical Oracle All-in-one Loader”).

Now, I’ve re-written the script one more time. Call it Doris 2 or GOAL 2, if you like. Me? I’m calling it Gladstone for no reason whatsoever except that half of Diznix’s name comes from Disraeli, so it’s only fair to remember the other fella from time to time!

I thought it might be worth mentioning a couple of Gladstone’s key design features here:

Gladstone deals with modern distros and has been run successfully on:

Gladstone only prepares your distro for the installation of 10g Release 2 or 11g Release 2… code to do an 11g Release 1 installation, for example, has been dropped. The reasoning there is that those are the only two still-supported Oracle releases (though obviously support is not provided by Oracle at all if you’re doing home installations onto the likes of Debian anyway!). Putting it another way: you’d be certifiably insane (IMNHO) to consider installing any other Oracle version these days, so I’m not going to waste time coding for something that isn’t worth doing!

For similar reasons, Gladstone won’t support doing a 10g Release 2 installation on Ubuntu 12 or Fedora 17: they are recent distros and Oracle’s support for 10g finished at least a year ago. It therefore seems pointless (to me) to do a relatively ancient 10g install on a distro that modern, so I’ve not written code to do it.

For all tested distros, both Oracle releases eventually install successfully, though nearly all 10g installations run into the “Error in invoking target ‘collector’ of makefile ‘/srv/oracle/product/10.2/db_1/sysman/lib/ins_emdb.mk’” error during the Oracle installation linking phase. This is a non-fatal error that can be ignored without apparent harm to any substantial bit of Oracle RDBMS functionality.

Nearly all 11g installations are flawless on all tested distros. Three distros (Fedora, Ubuntu 12.04 and Linux Mint Debian Edition) require an additional workaround for which an extra shell script is created by Gladstone. Run that additional script when you get linking errors during the main Oracle installation and you’ll be able to click ‘Retry’ and continue to a successful conclusion.

Gladstone was written with the idea of allowing myself to become the oracle user, rather than merely creating a new user as is traditional. By default, you are still prompted to supply a new account name (and if you just press enter, you get a new one called ‘oracle’), but if you type your own username in (or that of any existing user, come to that), that account will be re-configured to make it suitable for Oracle installation ownership. This is definitely a ‘non-standard’ way of doing things, but suits me and my desktop (and laptop) PCs just fine. Your mileage might well vary, of course, and all the usual disclaimers apply!

Some people never liked Doris or GOAL… they thought it wasn’t very original and would break Oracle support if done on a production box. Well, Gladstone isn’t very original either, since what it does is only what’s documented as needing to be done prior to an Oracle installation (though because you’re not having to do all the typing, it’s likely to get it more correct than you might manage on your own -which is the whole point, of course!) And the issue of support is moot, anyway -because all bar one of the distros Gladstone runs on are never supported by Oracle anyway, no matter how the installation is done!

Anyway, take it or leave it. If you take it and find that you encounter errors or issues, let me know here and I’ll see what can be done, if anything, to fix it for others. I’ll have detailed notes for each supported distro in due course.

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59 thoughts on “Gladstone – An Oracle installation script”

    1. dizwell Post author

      Yup, it’s got support until August 2012. Just as Vista is still a supported OS from Microsoft, until April 2012.

      I wouldn’t install Vista if I could get hold of Windows 7, however, and I still think I’d be certifiable if I installed 11gR1 when 11gR2 is available instead!

      So I’ll concede your point… and insist it was still the right thing to do to cut out all the 11gR1 code from Doris/Goal/Gladstone.

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        1. dizwell Post author

          You are entitled to your opinion about 11gR1. I don’t happen to agree with it, howvever -and waving Tom Kyte links around as a spurious appeal to authority doesn’t persuade me differently, either.

          As a matter of simple fact, however, I didn’t compare 11 Release 1 to Vista in the sense you imply (i.e, stability, level of support, quality of product etc). I merely state that Vista is still currently supported, but not the latest release and could reasonably be considered obsolete in the light of the subsequent release of Windows 7. Therefore, I think Vista is unlikely to be anyone’s choice of Windows OS to install today, right now… and it’s that same sort of reasoning which would apply, I think, to anyone wanting to install Oracle these days. 11gR1 might be “stable and well-supported”, but if you’re going to the bother of installing something from the 11g family in the first place, I fail to see why you’d choose to install something that falls *out* of support in just a year’s time. Going for the later release just seems to me to be by far the more sensible choice to make in both cases …and that’s the only point of comparison I was making. I’d say the same thing if you were tossing up whether to install Office 2007 or 2010, for example: it’s just not very sensible, other things being equal, to pick the already-obsoleted version.

          Oh, and as another statement of simple fact, 11g Release 2 was first made available in 2009. I hardly think a piece of software that is 2 years old counts as “quite new”. But that’s just my opinion, of course.

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      2. Jack Douglas

        From my ‘spurious’ Tom Kyte link:

        “Initial releases are *not* less stable – with that I very much disagree [...] They are all incremental improvements – what if we would have called 11gr1 10gr3 instead? What would your opinion be then?”

        Your argument for installing 11.2 is sound I admit – it is as you say nearly 2 years old. I’m only taking issue with your implied preference for 10.2 over 11.1

        You are repeating the myth that there is such a thing as “the 11g family” outside of Oracle’s marketing department – do you have any evidence to back this up? Perhaps Oracle documentation that supports the idea that the R2 releases are more stable, or contain fewer new features than R1 releases? Given that Kyte is an Oracle insider I’m inclined to treat what he says as ‘evidence’ rather than ‘opinion’.

        It is my ‘opinion’ that ‘opinions’ do not matter much, mine or your’s. Let’s see some evidence, and let’s behave like grown-ups and not get our knickers in a twist while we are at it.

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        1. dizwell Post author

          Jack, I really can’t work out what point you’re trying to make. You seem to think I’ve said that 11gR1 is less stable than 11gR2. Trouble is, I never said such a thing, and that’s explicitly and clearly NOT the reason why I have dropped Gladstone support for 11gR1. All I can do is say say it again, in case it wasn’t clear: 11gR1 support has been removed from Gladstone because I wouldn’t waste my time installing 11gR1 these days. It’s effectively been rendered obsolete by the 11gR2 release. In the same way, I wouldn’t install Vista on my home PC given that Windows 7 now exists; and I wouldn’t bother installing Office 2007 if I had a copy of Office 2010 to hand.

          Explicitly, too: when you say I have “an implied preference for 10.2 over 11.1″, that’s not true either. Oracle currently supports (or rather, did support when I first wrote Gladstone) both 10g and 11g product lines. 10gR2 and 11gR2 happen to be or were the current, latest, non-obsoleted versions of both product lines, and that’s the only reason Gladstone was written to support 10gR2 and 11gR2. If ever Oracle releases 11gR3, you can confidently expect Gladstone to lose 11gR2 support at some point, for precisely the same reasons. It will, in short, support anything which counts as the latest release in any given, supported product line. (And since 10g fell out of mainstream support last year, there’s an argument to be made that I ought to remove it from Gladstone too. Which may happen sooner rather than later, but I’m in no particular hurry there).

          Your link to Tom Kyte has him asserting that initial releases are NOT less stable than subsequent releases. Fine: I don’t actually care whether that’s true or not. The fact remains, it’s not an issue I’ve ever discussed here, and is not the issue that determined what made it into Gladstone or not. And that’s the reason the link remains spurious: factual it may be, relevant (to me, Gladstone and this page) it is not.

          If your knickers are twisted, therefore, by all means untwist them at your leisure. Mine are fine, if only because you appear to be wanting to wrestle with issues that are of zero interest to me and about which I’ve never expressed an opinion anyway!

          However, I will just add by way of general observation that as someone who has worked with Tom Kyte on at least one book and corresponded with him frequently in the past, I pretty much know for a fact that he would hate his opinions being treated as evidence of anything, unless there was a SQL trace statement to accompany them! Not that that is relevant here, either, I guess…

          Reply ↓
  2. Bob B

    Thanks Howard!

    Can’t tell you how much those original Oracle Installation Guides you produced way back in 2006 meant. Based on the confidence your articles gave me to experiment, in our development shop we’re now 100% Linux with Oracle using SLES, OpenSUSE and Centos.

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  3. Paul Brewer

    Howard,

    Many thanks for Gladstone, and for Doris.
    On thing about Gladstone though; Scientific Linux 6 doesn’t have redhat-lsb by default either, though of course yum install redhat-lsb will do the trick easily enough.

    Keep up the good work.
    Paul

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    1. dizwell Post author

      Thanks, Paul. Not entirely sure of the relevance of your comment, however, since when running on Scientific Linux, Gladstone uses lsb_release to work out if it’s environment is entirely kosher. The presence of redhat_lsb is not an issue at that point… and lsb_release is installed by default.

      Point being: Gladstone works on SL6 starting froma completely default installation and without any additional packages being required beforehand.

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      1. Paul Brewer

        Thanks, Howard. My point was that the script lsb_release is provided (in my case) by package redhat-lsb. Package redhat-lsb was *not* installed by default when I set up Scientific Linux 6 (64 bit). I installed from the live CD though; perhaps that is the difference?

        Anyway, no biggie. Cheers.

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  4. dizwell Post author

    Yes, that is your problem. The Live version of any distro is extremely cut-down when compared to its full-iso brethren, and all sorts of packages go missing in the process.

    In your specific case, the live CD is 693MB whereas the full-on ISO is 4.1GB, which means about 3GB of stuff is ‘missing’ before you start. Yup, you can always then pick and choose which bits to fix back in place. Indeed, I know people who’s hobby it is to build the smallest footprint server capable of running Oracle 11gR2 -by starting with Ubuntu Server, for example, and removing things. It’s quite an achievement in many ways, but it would never be allowed in a production server room, so ultimately it amounts to not much more than a bit of fun.

    For me, Live CDs fall into the same basket: certainly useful for trying out a distro; or for repairing botched file systems, but mostly a harmless bit of fun not intended for long-term serious use. Which is why I’ll never test against a Live CD of any distro.

    Since this is true for the Fedora distros as well as the SL ones, I’ll make it explicit in the article.

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  5. Paul Moore

    Thanks, Howard! I’ve always valued your installation guides/scripts, so I was looking to download Gladstone to set up a test install in a VM on my PC (not the best of environments, I know, but good enough for my purposes). However, I see that Gladstone only supports 64-bit installations (and my PC has a 32-bit host OS, so I can only use 32-bit Centos, sadly).

    Is this simply because you don’t see Gladstone as being appropriate for such installations, or is there a deeper reason for limiting it to 64 bit Oracle?

    For now, I guess I’m back to sorting out the dependencies, etc by hand. Ah, well…

    Reply ↓
    1. Colin 't Hart

      Paul,

      As long as your hardware is x64, you can run 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts as long as your virtualisation software supports it. VMware Server and VirtualBox do, not sure about others.

      Cheers,

      Colin

      Reply ↓
      1. dizwell Post author

        You’ll find it’s not whether the hardware is 64-bit or not that counts. It’s whether it’s got the necessary virtualization extensions (on the CPU). If you’ve got an early AMD Athlon, for example, that doesn’t have the AMD-V extensions, you won’t be able to do the 32-on-64-bit trick you’ve mentioned. We had a couple of Opteron boxes which suffered the same handicap, too. I can’t think of any 64-bit Intel chips which lack the Intel VT-x extensions, so the issue wouldn’t (probably) arise there… but it’s the presence or absence of the AMD-v or Intel VT-x extensions that’s the actual determinant of whether 32-bit guests can run on a 64-bit host, not the bitness of the host PC in and of itself.

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  6. dizwell Post author

    Hi Paul: I know it’s difficult when my old blog posts keep doing the disappearing act, but I wrote about 2 years ago that I don’t believe it sensible to install 32-bit Oracle these days. For anything with that small a memory footprint, I don’t think I’d be paying Oracle-sized license fees, but would be sticking to something like Oracle XE or PostgreSQL instead. Just a personal opinion though, of course: the corporation still makes 32-bit versions available, so they clearly don’t think that way.

    Even when it’s home use and license fees don’t apply… any CPU made in the last 3 or 4 years is at least capableof 64-bit operation, and 64-bit OSes (Windows 7, Linux) are so readily available, I personally just don’t see the point of doing anything much, Oracle included, in a 32-bit environment -though, obviously, if you’re stuck with an old PC, or a 32-bit Host OS, you’re not going to agree with me!

    I suppose my only other point is one of practicality: I download a bazillion Linux distros anyway to get Gladstone and the like tested properly. Having to download a double-bazillion distros would just take way too long, blow my meagre monthly bandwidth allowance and, all-in-all, be too much trouble. So I just stick to the 64-bit versions and Gladstone and his ilk follow suit as a matter of mere consequence.

    Anyay, Doris supported 32-bit, but GOAL didn’t… and Gladstone merely continues that practice. Sorry about that!

    Reply ↓
    1. Paul Moore

      Thanks for the comments. I do indeed have a 64-bit PC, so I should be able to get a 64-bit OS sorted in a VirtualBox VM. Just need to get my PC admin people to enable VT-x in the BIOS and I’m good to go.

      Reply ↓
  7. Richard

    Hi dizwell,

    Thanks for the Gladstone script. Is it possible for you to make it work with Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS? Or should I reformat and install either Ubuntu 10.10 or Linux Mint Debian Edition? If I were to reformat, I would lose nothing since my Oracle Database zip files are on a separate physical hard drive.

    Reply ↓
  8. dizwell Post author

    I suppose it could work with 10.04, but it would take some work (because it certainly doesn’t work as-is). But since I don’t run 10.04 and am never likely to, I wouldn’t hold my breath, I’m afraid.

    Personally, I wouldn’t touch Oracle on any form of Ubuntu: ‘stick to Centos or Scientific Linux’ is my opinion of the matter. So it’s really up to you whether you go 10.10 or LMDE (both of which work with Gladstone fine), or get a bit more drastic and switch to a proper Enterprise-class distro altogether.

    Sorry not to be of more help.

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  9. Adrian

    Hello Dizwell,
    thank you for all the great scripts DORIS & GLADSTONE.
    While installing Oracle 10g R2 SE on Scientific Linux 5.5 we found, that after a proper intallation the Enterprise Manager Console could not be started.
    After research we found patch p8350262 & Note [ID 1222603.1] which solved the problem.
    —
    From Oracle : What is the Issue?
    In Enterprise Manager Database Control with Oracle Database 10.2.0.4 and 10.2.0.5, the root certificate used to secure communications via the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol will expire on 31-Dec-2010 00:00:00. The certificate expiration will cause errors if you attempt to configure Database Control on or after 31-Dec-2010. Existing Database Control configurations are not impacted by this issue.
    —
    cheers, Adrian

    Reply ↓
    1. dizwell Post author

      Thanks for the tip, Adrian. I must say I’m a bit surprised, though: my 10g Enterprise Managers always work fine. I do use Firefox, however, which does always complain that the root certificate is not valid. But I simply click the buttons that say ‘allow an exception’, ‘import certificate’ and ‘go ahead, I really want you to import it!’, and the thing always works after that. Not sure if that’s the same issue you’ve encountered or not, but I’ve never needed to patch a 10g installation to get any part of the database stack (db, EM, ASM etc) working on any of the ‘Gladstone-approved’ distros. Maybe I just got lucky?!

      Update: I now realise why I have, indeed, been lucky… that Metalink note says the problem you describe only affects 10.2.0.4 and 10.2.0.5. I do all my Gladstone testing on database versions downloadable from OTN… and the latest one for 10gR2 on 64-bit Linux they have available is 10.2.0.1. So I’ve never encountered the problem (which is a lot more substantial than the ‘certificate not trusted’ browser-fixable issue I described). So, a great heads-up from you. Thanks.

      Update 2: Confirmed. Fresh 10.2.0.1 installation does not encounter this problem. (Obviously, upgrading it to something a little more current would!)

      Reply ↓
  10. Richard

    Hi dizwell,

    Thanks for your quick response. I’ll switch from Ubuntu 10.04.2 to Ubuntu 10.10 pretty soon. The main reason I’m sticking with Ubuntu 10.10 in this case or LMDE is because I use gnome-orca a screen reader and brltty. Both are in Oracle Linux 6, I assume Scientific Linux 6 etc, but aren’t as easy to configure as on Ubuntu or Debian. The only thing I cannot do with the screen reader or brltty is use sql developer, but I like SQLPlus better anyway.

    I don’t mind learning code by hand. I just hope Ubuntu or LMDE don’t have any weird issues with my system’s hardware. If Oracle Linux, Scientific Linux, and the other enterprize distros had better accessibility for the installer and stable speech that didn’t crash without warning at odd times, I’d switch to using them. I can keep you up to date if you wantn as to how my install works out on Ubuntu 10.10, if you’d like.

    Reply ↓
      1. Richard

        Hi dizwell,

        I’ve gotten Oracle 11GR1 to work under Ubuntu 10.04 with not that many issues. The only issue I’ve run into is not being able to use DBCA and NETCA after the first time. It gives me some kind of Java exception error. I’d have to go to my Linux box and give you the exact message. I know of a work around, but I don’t know how to relink the 2 modified files when doing a reinstall. I use R1 not R2 since it was R1 that I learned on and I am getting certified on.

        Reply ↓
        1. dizwell Post author

          Hi Richard: speaking entirely personally, I would consider an Oracle installation in which neither dbca nor netca functioned properly to be pretty well borked myself. That said, I guess if you’re not going to be creating lots of databases or re-configuring Net8 too often, it’s maybe bearable… or at least it would force you to be familiar with the Create Database SQL command and the inner workings of vi or nano! Anyway, glad you got things working for you.

          Reply ↓
  11. sayued

    Hi Dizwell,

    I was googling for your Oracle Analytics article about which I have read some reviews saying it was an excellent read. can you please resurrect it or point me to the right link.

    Thanks
    sayued

    Reply ↓
    1. dizwell Post author

      Well, I’m not sure precisely to which article you’re referring, I’m afraid. Chances are that you’re following links to old material which I removed many years ago now and which will definitely not be making a come-back.

      Reply ↓
  12. RANA

    Hello Dizwell,
    really a very good efforts of yours for these scripts.
    will check these in my environment.

    Thanks,
    RANA

    Reply ↓
  13. Giskard

    Hi im using fedora 15 64 bits….I tried to install oracle using both 32 and 64 but without luck at all….Im stuck at this message:
    Error in invoking target ‘agent nmhs’ of makefile ‘/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/sysman/lib/ins_emagent.mk’
    Thats why I wanted to try this script…but no luck at all…Im stuck at the same point…I even did a fresh install of fedora. Any clues? Thanks for all

    Reply ↓
    1. dizwell Post author

      It’s probably my fault for scattering stuff all over, but you need to read around on this website a bit, because I discuss the specifics of Fedora 15 and Oracle installations using Gladstone in several other articles (see, for example, here and here). The short story is that Oracle-on-Fedora has a unique linking problem that almost no other distro suffers, and Gladstone sorts that out for you by outputting a second shell script, which you run as the oracle user, when you encounter the problem. You then click ‘Retry’ in the Oracle installer and the problem goes away. That second shell script is output by Gladstone in the /home/oracle-username/Desktop directory… because of Fedora 15′s use of Gnome Shell, you suffer the additional problem that you won’t know the second shell script has been created there unless you know to look for it.

      So Fedora 15 64-bit and Oracle 11gR2 64-bit is not a problem (don’t run 32-bit databases on a 64-bit platform, of course!), but you do have to jump through one extra hoop to get there.

      Summing up (1) Fresh OS install; (2) run Gladstone; (3) Launch Oracle Universal Installer; (4) Wait for the linking error; (5) in a new terminal session, run the second shell script (/home/ora-user-name/Desktop/fedora-linking-error-fix.sh); (6) switch back to OUI and click Retry; (6) Wait for the Oracle installer to conclude successfully.

      Good luck.

      Oh… and PS. An alternative workaround is to use Oracle 10g Release 2 instead of 11g… the linking issue doesn’t affect 10g at all. (Not much of a workaround, I agree!)

      Reply ↓
      1. wadas

        Hi! Thanks for you fast answer….and sorry for my late reply…
        Actually I read those posts…But I cant find that file…apparently the script isnt creating it…. (I even try to find it on every user Desktop….but not even there)
        Ill try to make the script and run it manually.

        Thanks again!

        Reply ↓
        1. dizwell Post author

          Well, I’m not sure what’s going on. The fact is, the gladstone.sh shell script is deterministic: it does what it does, the same way, every time. And if it gets a chance to execute lines 891 to 908, then it cannot do anything other than create a new shell script (called fedora-linking-error-fix.sh) in the Desktop directory of the user you’ve declared to be the oracle user.

          There’s no point running around “every user” to see if it’s worked. Read the original shell script: it only ever creates things in the Desktop directory of the oracle user you specify.

          I’ve created a little (Flash) video of what ought to be happening. Download it from here. I don’t know if this is happening for you, and if not why it’s not, but it’s supposed to happen for any Fedora 15 user, every time.

          Once you know the script has been created, you just have to invoke it -during the Oracle install- after which everything works fine. I didn’t video that, but I can do so if it helps.

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  14. SB

    Greetings, I made a tweak to your script to make it work flawlessly on a German install of CentOS. I’m sharing it below in case you want to incorporate it.

    Basically to get the local IP address you grepped some English: ‘inet addr:’ as opposed to what ifconfig reports in German: ‘inet Adresse:’

    [code]
    IP=`/sbin/ifconfig | grep 'inet addr:'| grep -v '127.0.0.1' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'`
    [/code]

    So instead, I made grep cast a wider net yet still miss ipv6…

    [code]
    IP=`/sbin/ifconfig | grep 'inet'| grep -v '127.0.0.1'| grep -v 'inet6'| cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'`
    [/code]

    I don’t have an English install handy to test on, but I _think_ it should work. So… YMMV.

    Prost!

    Steve

    Reply ↓
    1. dizwell Post author

      Thanks, Steve: that is really useful. I’ll test ASAP and, provided the English system passes, I’ll incorporate your edit with much gratitude! :-)

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  15. Richard

    Hi Dizwell,

    I am unsure why Oracle’s DBCA and NETCA don’t work after the first run on my specific Ubuntu system. I’m familiar with creating databases by hand. I’m also familiar with updating the tnsnames.ora, listener.ora, and /etc/initab.ora files by hand for any new databases. I’ll keep trying the install from scratch until I find out why the 2 apps won’t run the second time.

    Reply ↓
  16. Richard

    Hi Dizwell,

    Update, I figured out why the apps wouldn’t run a second time. I’ll list the steps as I did them this way I can find them again, if I forget. Or if anyone else runs into this same issue. This is for Ubuntu 10.04.3 x64 with all updates. Ubuntu Lucid has no SELinux if it is updated beforehand.

    1. sudo xhosts +
    sudo password, it should say all connections allowed

    2. su – oracle
    oracle password

    3. . oraenv
    then the main database name, mine is orcl

    It should say /u01/app/oracle for the Oracle home directory. Then run either DBCA or NETCA. It will take a second or 2 and the application you’ve chosen to run should start.
    To disable the unlimited connections to the local host run:
    sudo xhosts -

    Reply ↓
  17. sidh

    Thanks for this G-R-E-A-T script (whatever its name).

    When I test it (the gladstone one), I noticed some parts were not displayed, and realized it was because of the “tput setaf 0″ stenzas in the script that didn’t fit in a black background terminal (was using KDE’s Konsole), so I “sed” them out and everything is fine now ;)

    Best Regards,

    Reply ↓
  18. dizwell Post author

    Yeah, I think I’ve written about this “feature” before, somewhere… but I can’t seem to find where now. Wherever it was, I said something along the lines of “KDE is not something I use a lot, it’s not the standard (default) desktop environment on a Red Hat/Scientific/Centos Oracle server, so I’m not going to worry about it”. Good to see you editing your way around it, though: thanks!

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  19. emomast

    Greetings and thanks for the great work it really helps a lot. Any chance of adjusting the script for openSuse 12.1?

    Reply ↓
    1. dizwell Post author

      That a definite “no” to a 32-bit version, because I don’t believe it makes any sense to use 32-bit versions of Oracle these days. (If you do, fair enough…. but there are limits to the number of permutations of distros, oracle versions and bit-ness that I can cope with. 64-bit only was a decision I took about 4 years ago in order to reduce the odds back in my favour.

      Linux Mint 12 is a possibility. I don’t use it myself, so it’s not a high priority. I am also no longer very sure these days what actually constitutes Linux Mint 12, what with its new Debian Edition and so on. If I get a chance, I’ll take a look at doing something with this version.

      Reply ↓
    1. dizwell Post author

      Using a text editor. Over to you.

      However: I will not, ever, support 32-bit installations… they’re really not a good idea. Meanwhile, as it says just immediately above you, I haven’t got around to working out all the issues associated with installing on Linux Mint 12 of whatever bit-ness. So you are way ahead of the curve.

      If you get it sorted, let me know: I’ll incorporate your work and everyone can benefit.

      But not 32-bit. Am not interested, don’t think you should be, and don’t think anyone else will be either.

      Reply ↓
      1. dizwell Post author

        A further follow-up: Linux Mint 12 uses the Gnome 3 libraries. All bets are off at that point, I’m afraid. I don’t anyone with a successful Oracle Enterprise Edition 11gR2 on a Gnome 3-based distro… let alone a .deb-based one, too.

        We need to see Oracle themselves making moves to run in a post-Gnome 2 world, I think. In the meantime: use virtualisation and run Oracle on something that works (like Centos or Scientific Linux)

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    1. dizwell Post author

      Very fair question!

      Same reason it doesn’t offer genuine Red Hat: I don’t have those distros handy (being poor -I have no way to download either RHEL or OEL without incurring the full 4+ GB download, which is a fair chunk out of my meagre 15GB monthly limit), so I can’t know what the lsb_release strings for them should be.

      I did have RHEL 5.x available at my last job, so I could have incorporated that into the script, but I just never quite got around to it (in fact, I kept having to edit my own script after downloading it, every time I built a new server!)

      Even if you were kind enough to tell me what the lsb_release -d command returns, precisely, I still wouldn’t be able to check it/test it, so I’d be a bit reluctant to add it in.

      Reply ↓
  23. goncarz

    I used this script on fedora 16 and everything was ok but i installed fedora 17 kde and i can’t install oracle 11g. I read:
    Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2) Installation On Fedora 17 (F17) from oracle web site and more other. I am very furious, because i lost 3 days and i don’t know what i was doing wrong .
    Can You update your script for fedora 17 ?

    Reply ↓
    1. dizwell Post author

      I don’t get a lot of time to update things much, these days. And ever since Fedora decided to run with Gnome 3, I’ve been very disinclined to do anything with it. But I’ll take a look as soon as I can.

      Reply ↓
  26. Thai

    I came to your blog after reading your reply in the LMDE forum. I’m very glad and thankful for your work. However, I didn’t use LMDE or Linux Mint or Ubuntu any more. I switched to ArchLinux. I wonder if you have a little free time to support ArchLinux as well.

    Thanks.

    Reply ↓
    1. dizwell Post author

      Hi Thai, thanks for the kind words. I have used Arch before and have certainly thought about making Gladstone work with it. But Arch is not a distro I’ve used *extensively* or recently, meaning that experimenting get Gladstone running on it smoothly will not be trivial (for me, at least!).

      Sabayon will be added to Gladstone in a week or so, and Mageia is on my list. But that’s about it for the short-term.

      So: Sorry. I’m not ruling it out, but I doubt I’ll get round to it any time soon.

      Reply ↓
  27. Yves

    Hi, Thanks for the blog. I tried to get it running on Debian Squeeze 6.0.6 (latest for amd64 ) but I am missing the gcc 3.4.6 and some other older versions that Oracle 11gR2 requires. What could be done ? Thanks.

    Reply ↓
    1. dizwell Post author

      Gladstone definitely installs GCC. I’ve tested it many times on Debian 6. There are no reasons I am aware of why it should fail for you. Just be aware that the screen in Oracle’s installer which warns you which things are missing etc …is to be completely ignored. Click “ignore all” and let I get on with things. If Gladstone has been run first and properly, nothing that is actually needed can be missing.

      I will take a look at it as soon as I can, though. Just in case some if-then-else condition or something isn’t working as expected.

      Reply ↓
  28. Yves

    Hi, Thanks for the prompt response…
    Yes indeed it works after checking “ignore all”.

    I had to modify line 203 to be compatible with the version Dedian offers now (Oct. 2012) for amd64 / squueze:

    [ "$VERCHECK" != "Description: Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.6 (squeeze)" ] &&

    I entered also manualy the “telinit 4″ to get rid of the other warning.

    Thanks

    Reply ↓
    1. dizwell Post author

      Thanks Yves. Happy to hear the ‘ignore all’ tip got you through. Also, thanks for the heads-up about the lsb_release name change… if they change the name, then yup… Gladstone bombs out. Glad you worked out that a quick edit might be all that’s needed to keep it on track!

      Once I’ve done this install myself and assured myself it’s all OK, I’ll incorporate the change back into Gladstone for others to benefit from.

      Reply ↓
  29. dizwell Post author

    Incidentally, I hadn’t realised that Debian seems to stick to runlevel 2 by default. It’s never occurred to me to check before, but now you mention it, I’ll see if I can’t throw in a switch to runlevel 4 or 5 to cure the ‘jaws’ problem.

    Reply ↓
  30. routersetup

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