Posts Tagged ‘Create ISO’

If you get your free OTN copies of Oracle 11g from here, then you’ll be the proud owner of a zip file called something like linux.x64_11gR1_database.zip. That’s perfectly fine if you don’t mind unzipping the files on your hard disk and installing Oracle from there. But if I create a virtual machine to run Oracle, I would usually prefer to be able to install Oracle from a DVD (or, at least, a DVD image in the form of an ISO), because that way I needn’t consume nearly 4GB of virtual disk space by copying the zip file to it and then unpacking it. So the question then arises, how do you turn that downloaded zip file into a functional DVD image?

Well, one thing you can’t do is use Brasero (the default Ubuntu/Gnome CD and DVD creation tool) to simply create a disk image of the extracted zip file! That’s because Oracle uses a lot of nested directories, and Brasero doesn’t let you configure the necessary extensions to the ISO standard to allow all those directories to be read properly from the finished DVD image. You’ll just get execution errors the minute you try using a DVD image that’s been constructed that way.

I am sure various GUI tools could be employed to get around this problem (and if I was a KDE user, I know that K3B can do the job with ease), but the simplest thing is for confirmed Gnome users is to issue the following command in a terminal window:

genisoimage -o Desktop/ora11gx64.iso -R -J -hfs Desktop/database

What all that means is that you’re using the program genisoimage (which should be installed by default in Ubuntu 9.04: if not, use aptitude or the Synaptic Package Manager to install it) to output a file called (in my case) ora11gx64.iso in my home’s Desktop directory. The image should use the Rockridge and Joilet extensions (which is what lets those multiple nested sub-directories work OK). And the source of the entire DVD image is to be the Desktop/database directory (which will only exist, of course, if I’ve already extracted my downloaded zip file on my desktop).

The output from that lot takes just a few moments to create, but it will be usable in an Oracle installation. You can use the ISO output file directly if installing Oracle in a virtual machine; or you can use Brasero to burn it to a physical DVD.

Update: The 11g Release 2 OTN downloads come in two parts. That is, there are two separate zip files, each about 1GB in size. Those need to be unzipped into a single directory (called database) before the genisoimage command can be pointed at it. So, for that release of Oracle, you have to do the following:

• Download both zip files to your desktop
• Open a command prompt and unzip the linux_11gR2_database_1of2.zip file. That will create a database directory.
• Now unzip the linux_11gR2_database_2of2.zip file. The contents of this file will be extracted and merged into the already-existing database directory.
• Now you can create your ISO image from the Desktop/database directory, using the command shown above.