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:

• Linux Mint 10 (“Julia”)
• Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE)
• Debian 6.0 (“Squeeze”)
• Ubuntu 10.10 (“Maverick Meercat”)
• Fedora 14
• Fedora 15
• Centos 5.5 (Update: also 5.6, 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2)
• Scientific Linux 5.5 (Update: also 5.6 and 5.7)
• Scientific Linux 6.0 (Update: also 6.1 and 6.2)

Note that if a distro supplies a “Live CD” and a much larger DVD installation ISO, it is the DVD ISO version that will work. The Live CD version will (probably) be missing quite a lot of files and libraries that Gladstone expects to be there, because they are there when a full-blown DVD ISO is used for the Operating System install. Specifically, do not use the Live CD versions of Fedora, Centos or Scientific Linux and expect Gladstone to work. Similarly, do not use the Server Edition of Ubuntu… Gladstone’s been designed for, and tested on, the Desktop Edition only.

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 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. Two distros (Fedora and Linux Mint Debian Edition) require an additional workaround for which a 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 the thing simply can’t be run (as it stands and by design) on a distro for which Oracle offers any support!

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.