It’s Gladstone as you’ve never seen him before: sporting a dashing new look in the form of my ‘Jaws’ progress indicator, which allows the various package installations taking place at the time to be done slightly more efficiently than before. Makes my code a bit easier to read, too, at certain points!
In addition, the thing which really gives a gleam to his eye is his new-found support for doing Oracle 11gR2 installations on 64-bit Gnome-based Sabayon. Large and very silly moustaches are entirely optional, therefore.
It’s not perfect: things start out a bit rough when Gladstone produces black text and Sabayon decides to use a black background in its default terminal windows! The result is like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar… and you’ll need to edit the terminal colour profile to something other than the default ‘white on black’ before you can get much further:
Before: 
and After: 
No doubt there’s a clever way for me to auto-detect the colour scheme in use and react accordingly… but until I find out what that is, you’ll just have to deal with it manually!
Curiously, during the ‘software prerequisites’ installation stage, I found that any attempt to install the rpm package caused 580MB of downloads plus a metric crap-tonne of grief in being unable to reboot the PC once it had all finished. I accordingly stopped trying to install it… and its absence didn’t appear to faze the Oracle installation at all, whilst allowing everything else to behave perfectly normally. It reduced my Internet bills, too. It’s odd, since “rpm” is always mentioned as a pre-requisite for every Oracle install, no matter what distro you’re using. Clearly, it’s not that simple!
Anyway: once you get to the point of launching the Oracle Universal Installer, be prepared for it to complain about practically everything! It will even declare that appropriate OS users and groups haven’t been created (though they have). It’s the usual trick with the ‘Ignore All’ checkbox, therefore, and the OUI will proceed without drama:
Like most modern distros, Sabayon will cause linking errors to be thrown quite early on in the piece:
Gladstone will have prepared for this possibility by writing a ‘fix-linking-errors.sh’ shell script to your desktop ahead of time. Just find that file at the first linking error, double-click it and run it as yourself (not as root). After that, you should be able to click the Retry button in the Oracle Universal Installer and no further errors will then occur.
I must say that I really like Sabayon as a distro. It gets nearly everything right that I was looking for during my recent installfest. It’s polished and practical and runs everything I need it to do. In a contest between it and Linux Mint Debian Edition, there’s actually no contest at all: Sabayon knocks LMDE into a cocked hat, in large part because LMDE is using tricks like MAME to hold onto a Gnome 2 codebase (resulting in quite a bit of instability and all-round flakiness, in my view). Sabayon, in contrast, has fully adopted Gnome 3 (though KDE and XFCE versions are available). Though I despise Gnome 3 as a desktop, being on a ‘proper’ codebase does result in greater overall O/S stability, I think. Being able to run Oracle on it without too much pain is then just the icing on the cake.
If only I’d looked into it before Windows 8 was released to manufacturing…
I’ll close by mentioning that whilst re-jigging Gladstone to take account of all this new stuff, I realised that the old code contained a lot of howlers …bugs which ought to have caused anyone using it to install on such old warhorses as Centos or OEL to start beating a path to my door complaining about it. However, no such complaints were received… which makes me wonder if anyone is actually using it any more! If not, fine: I certainly do, and I’m its most important customer -but I could certainly do with more users/testers letting me know if things aren’t right. Anyone with a little patience and a big, fat, fast Internet connection is welcome to do lots of beta testing …and I’d be grateful for the feedback!
