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Tom Kyte

Thanks for the question, Meyer.

Asked: October 22, 2002 - 11:16 am UTC

Last updated: October 18, 2012 - 8:20 am UTC

Version: 8.16

Viewed 10K+ times! This question is

You Asked

Tom,

I want to learn to use Linux and do not have ANY experience with it yet so I am not sure of the best way to go. I have used AIX for basic functions but not sure if it will be similar.

What version do you run personally ....and what do you recommend (laptop and/or server). Will there be a GUI?

Any tips or anything else to point out...and is the DB and IAS certified/avail for these specific versions?

Thanks,
Meyer

and Tom said...



I am using Redhat linux version 8.0 (after upgrading from 7.2 to 7.3...). I never ever considered upgrading from windows version X to version Y to version Z. The upgrade was so simple and went flawlessly and I don't have gobs of incompatible DLL's laying all around me.

I run it on two different desktops (one compaq at work, one dell at home) and a toshiba laptop as well.


There is a GUI -- a GUI that believe it or not predates windows by some years. X11. The window manager I am personally fond of it KDE (comes with). There are dozens of others out there.

You'll find it very window-esqe. Got a little start menu, desktop, drag and drop -- the whole thing (just runs a tad faster).

DB and Tools are supported and shipping on linux all over the place. Internally at Oracle -- many of our demo machines used to showcase the product are running on RAC + Linux now.



Tip:

It is not windows. Do not expect it to be. It is different and that is what makes it good. If it were the same, it would be rather boring.

Make sure you have time, time to learn, time to explore.

It made working with my desktops fun again.


Rating

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Comments

Linux Server

Jerry, October 22, 2002 - 12:15 pm UTC

Another option, which I've had fun with, is to keep Windows, and get a second machine on which to install Linux. Then network them together with a couple of cheap ethernet cards. Then access the linux box with telnet and SQL*Net.

You'll learn basic networking, Oracle network administration, as well as Oracle on a Unix-type platform.

Desktop version of redhat?

Jim Kennedy, October 22, 2002 - 12:21 pm UTC

Can we use personal or professional vs advanced server? I don't mind spending $150 or less, but $800 is a little out of my league just to try it out and learn more Linux, and setting up Oracle on Linux. Its coming out of my pocket for professional development.

Tom Kyte
October 22, 2002 - 1:04 pm UTC

I've been using the totally for free one from the redhat website myself. No support (well, I did buy redhat 7.3 workstation for $70 usd so I do have access to their support)....



I like it

Martin Guillen, October 22, 2002 - 12:23 pm UTC

I'm learning Oracle and I have decided to learn it on Linux.
If you like IT, the Operating Systems, programming or anything related to Computer Science then Linux is the way to go.
This is my opinion and I don't like to offend people that prefer other OSs.(flame wars starts too fast in this topic)
I'm using SuSE and is a pretty good distribution.
If you are coming from Windows take your time to learn.
In the beginning Linux is some hard (not too much) to learn but definitively it is valuable and funny.
Good Luck!

PS: When it comes you new book, Tom?

Tom Kyte
October 22, 2002 - 1:05 pm UTC

I've put pen to paper -- it is due out april'ish 2003...

Robert, October 22, 2002 - 12:32 pm UTC


Thanks

Meyer, October 22, 2002 - 1:23 pm UTC

Thanks,

From Red Hat
They have three kinds:

1)Personal: for desktops (39$)

2)Profesional: for desktops w/more features (149$)

3)Advanced Server: Enterprise Server's
(799.00, 1499.00, 2499.00) depending on support level.

Do you know if Oracle will run on #2, according to the tech person at Red Hat Oracle is only certified to run on #3, but since it is my laptop and a play/learn instance I only care if it runs and could deal w/quirks no-support. Before I order, Is that what you are using? Do you have a DB instance and/or IAS on #2 or just the server?

Thanks,
Meyer

Tom Kyte
October 22, 2002 - 3:45 pm UTC

I've been using professional.

I have the database and some tools (OEM, Jdev).

I do not have iAS running myself. I know people who do however (some of the people that work for me for example)


Anyone out there care to comment on what linux they have and what they are running on it?

...Informative but what, oh, what to do withOracle ?

robert, October 22, 2002 - 1:40 pm UTC

for a split second I thought I got to AskLinus.com ;)
but hey it's your show, Tom and you can do anything you like...

Tom Kyte
October 22, 2002 - 3:46 pm UTC

VBG...

You can use 7.3 for Everything, But...

Jeremy Smith, October 22, 2002 - 4:08 pm UTC

There's no support for 9iAS R2 on any Redhat but Advanced Server. Advanced Server is basically 7.2+kernel hacks and clustering utilities. If you're just trying to learn, you don't need it for yourself. I wrote up some directions for installing 9iDBR2 and 9iASR2 on Redhat 7.3 (pretty much just a collection of what's out there on otn). I can't guarantee they're flawless, but they work for me. I'll be putting them up on the web in the next week or so.

On learning linux: the best way to do it is to get rid of Windows...or at least relegate it to only playing games. Do all of your home and business work on it. It's like learning a language. Total immersion is the way to go.

Tom Kyte
October 22, 2002 - 4:24 pm UTC

It is just like with windows NT -- only supported really on NT Server, not NT Workstation but for playing about -- it works find.


Total immersion -- you will be assimilated, resistance is futile. I like it. I haven't booted windows for weeks....

Linux rocks

Jeremy, October 22, 2002 - 4:12 pm UTC

I've been running Oracle, OEM, and JDEV on Linux Redhat 7.x and now 8.0 for a few months now and haven't looked back to windoze once. At first I had some concern since people send me excel spreadsheets to use for updatinfo info in the db, but OpenOffice handles these just fine!

Also, it is nice not having to ftp files to a unix box so I can sed,awk,cut,grep,etc. If you really want to stay with windows checkout </code> http://www.redhat.com/software/cygwin/ <code>

:)

Tianhua Wu, October 22, 2002 - 4:48 pm UTC

I have been used Oracle on Linux for more than three years since Oracle 8.0.5 and Redhat 6.2. Now I have Oracle 9.2.0 on RedHat 7.3. It may be a little bit more challange for the beginners, but it is totally worth it. I still remebered it took me several long days to make Oracle 8.0.5 worked properly on RedHat 6.2. But once you are through it, you will understand the OS and Oracle much much better. Besides, it is much easier to install nowadays. I use KDE myself too. It is awesome.

Oracle Linux Support not 100% yet...

Jeremy Smith, October 22, 2002 - 7:07 pm UTC

You have to understand that Oracle is pretty quirky about what distributions they support and with what packages. I'm sympathetic to the fact that they're trying to test a _huge_ product on many different platforms. Supporting every linux distribution is probably pretty unrealistic. Yet although I've always been able to do it eventually, there's almost always bugs that show up that I think should have been easily solved in the Linux versions of the product. Therefore, it helps dramatically to understand UNIX pretty well in order to work through them.

For instance, here's one I hit last night. I use dbca to create the setup scripts for a new database, and run the scripts from the command line (faster than doing it through the java gui). If you look at the main shell script it creates, it looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

mkdir /u01/app/oracle/admin/db01/bdump
mkdir /u01/app/oracle/admin/db01/cdump
mkdir /u01/app/oracle/admin/db01/create
[more ommitted]
setenv ORACLE_SID db01
[runs the rest of the scripts]

Well, there's two problems with this script, and they're pretty basic UNIX stuff. Dbca will let you change the directories to anything you want...including directories where the parents don't exist. So, if you want this script to work, you're going to want to change the mkdir lines to
mkdir -p [dirname]

Also, "setenv" is a csh/tcsh thing and doesn't work either in plain Bourne "sh" as the script indicates, or in "bash" which is actually what sh is on most linux distributions. What you really want is an export ORACLE_SID=db01 or better yet an "ORACLE_SID=db01; export ORACLE_SID" to be compatible with real /bin/sh.

[Let me say now this may be in the release notes or metalink, but still...]

My guess is that Oracle tests the full functionality of each product only on a limited selection of UNIX versions.
Which means, of course, that you're going to end up with some issues like this on most platforms. Are they super serious? Not really, but they're prevalent enough that you can expect to solve one or two every time unless you're using the super-preferred platform(s). (Solaris and HPUX?) Supposedly RedhatAS 2.1 is destined to become a "preferred" platform, but for now it has similar problems.




kubi, October 31, 2002 - 12:22 pm UTC


connecting to oracle

atul, November 12, 2002 - 2:28 am UTC

Sir,

I'm using red hat linux 7.2 with oracle 8.1.7
I'm writing a script to connect to oracle from bash.

it's test script ...it goes like this

--------------------------------------------------------
export ORACLE_SID=odb
export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/ora01/app/product/8.1.7
echo "Started"
echo 'connect internal\n select sysdate from dual;\n exit' | svrmgrl

-----------------------------------------------------------

It gives me error like
MGR 04546 Invalid connect string

Could you tell me how to do it??

Thanks.
atul


Tom Kyte
November 12, 2002 - 10:17 am UTC

I use

svrmgrl <<EOF
connect internal
select sysdate from dual;
exit
EOF

myself. easier to code, easier to read and I know it works.

But do you like the GUI?

Shrek, November 12, 2002 - 12:06 pm UTC

<VBG>? Miss that old usenet language,
FWIW:
From my viewpoint, the only positive about Linux is that I am not dependent on OEM as I am on Windows, because I can run bash, OTOH, I want to run common GUIs like netca, I get all kinds of java awt bugs, I run dbassist and it never shows up on the screen, then I do a ps, and I see that Oracle has launched many many jvm's, I get frustrated, and modify tnsnames, or sqlnet files by hand, and I know OEM doesn't like that, but I don't need OEM on Linux, as much as I do on Windows.

I know my original install wasn't very clean, but there seems to be some incompatibility with Oracle 8.1.7 and the native .so versions that come with 7.2, peronally I would like to have the same positive experience as you all do, but I don't think I am there yet.

BFN
Shrek


Tom Kyte
November 13, 2002 - 12:30 pm UTC

I haven't had any issues with the gui's personally -- i've used 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 RH. I would recommend you use a slight more current release of Oracle -- lots of stuff that make it more then worthwhile.

Does anyone have a working autostart/stop script?

Eric Ma, November 12, 2002 - 10:26 pm UTC

I copied a working script from Solaris to RedHat 8.0 but it failed to autostart Oracle 9.2.0. The script is essentially the same as the one from Oracle's installation manual, and it is placed under /etc/init.d, and symlinked in /etc/rc2, 3, and 5.d. Any suggestions?

Tom Kyte
November 13, 2002 - 12:59 pm UTC

so, what does the script look like -- I cannot see your terminal from where I'm sitting today ;)

Linux

Piotr Jarmuz, November 13, 2002 - 12:53 pm UTC

I started with Slackware distribution then used Mandrake with KDE on my notebook and now I use Debian (best for server side) I also run Oracle on it although it is not officially supported on this platform... well I have never had slightest problems with it. I don't need GUI tools (never liked them really). I used them only to install Oracle software. Is there any more UNIX-like way to that?

Shrek: As far as lots of jvm are concerned it is due to the way Linux implements threads. It does not have threads like e.g. Solaris. It "emulates" them with processes. Those processes, however, share all the file system info, file descriptors, memory maps, signal settings, etc. They have private stacks in kernel and userland and separate process structure and this is why they show up after ps command as separate processes.

It's interesting to notice the difference between multithreading styles used in Oracle and in JVM. Oracle has explicite shared memory management (shmat(2)) while JVM implicite (thru clone(2)).

Linux is cool! It's soooooooo much fun to read old <<experts'>> emails giving severe criticism to Linux some 8-10 years ago. But Linux stood the probe of time.

Linux + Oracle + Apache + Perl = "the sky is the limit" ;)

Regards.

Startup shutdown under Linux

Arun Gupta, November 13, 2002 - 12:54 pm UTC

Please search on Metalink for the following:
Note:1016388.102
LINUX: DBSHUT FAILS WHEN ISSUING REBOOT, INIT6, OR SHUTDOWN
The Solaris shutdown scripts won't work with Linux since it needs a /var/lock/subsys/<filename> file to be created. You may want to check that in the dbstart script supplied with Oracle 9.2, the script checks for init.ora file for startup. If you are using spfile, then the script will fail to start the database.

Apart from these two issues, I was able to run Oracle 9.2, OEM, DBCA, DBA Studio and every other Oracle supplied GUI program under RHL7.3/8.0. No problems once the configuration is right. Since the fonts were not very good, I use vmware to run Windows XP as a virtual machine in Linux and use all the GUI tools/Oracle client from within Windows to access Oracle database running on Linux.


My autostart/stop script

Eric Ma, November 13, 2002 - 11:14 pm UTC

Below is the script that runs fine on Solaris, but not Linux:

#!/bin/sh

ORA_HOME=/export/data/oracle/ora92
ORA_OWNER=oracle

if [ ! -f $ORA_HOME/bin/dbstart ]
then
echo "Oracle startup: cannot start"
exit
fi

case "$1" in
'start')
su - $ORA_OWNER -c $ORA_HOME/bin/dbstart &
su - $ORA_OWNER -c "$ORA_HOME/bin/lsnrctl start listener" &
;;
'stop')
su - $ORA_OWNER -c $ORA_HOME/bin/dbshut &
su - $ORA_OWNER -c "$ORA_HOME/bin/lsnrctl stop listener" &
;;
esac

Do you see any problems? My RH Linux starts up in the GUI mode.

Tom Kyte
November 13, 2002 - 11:28 pm UTC

see
</code> http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:::::P11_QUESTION_ID:387218751430 <code>

that is what I use. I don't like dbstart/dbshut cause I don't maintain oratabs or anything like that.


O/S

mo, November 14, 2002 - 7:50 am UTC

Tom:

1. What problems do you see with windows O/S? It seems you do not like it much?

2. Is not linux similar to unix? or does it have user interface like windows?

3. I thought oracle runs best on sun solaris unix, then HP unix and then IBM aix? Am I wrong?

Thank you,


Tom Kyte
November 14, 2002 - 7:13 pm UTC

1) I like open systems. I like choice.

2) linux is so similar to unix that I feel very comfortable with it -- linux has a nice interface (window manager) these days -- very comfortable with it. In fact it has dozens of window managers (looks and feels) -- you can actually pick and choose from one of zillions

3) so wrong.

A reader, November 14, 2002 - 10:22 pm UTC

what are you using as the "linux" office
i mean how do you read word docs or power point presentations

Tom Kyte
November 15, 2002 - 7:10 pm UTC

</code> http://www.codeweavers.com/home/ <code>
for when I have to run ppt/word

OpenOffice works great too for most stuff.

Here are some Linux links...and suggestion for a GUI tool, if you want one.

Jeremy Smith, November 15, 2002 - 1:16 am UTC

Where you can get 99% of the questions you've asked answered.

</code> http://www.tldp.org http://www.linux.org http://www.redhat.com/oracle/

Lately, I've been playing with a tool called TOra, which can be found at 
http://www.globecom.se/tora <code>. I've been pretty impressed with its maturity, although it doesn't do everything yet. Coupled with the Java-based tools Oracle provides, and of course the standard command-line tools, there's no reason as an Oracle developer you can't be Windows-free.

Who said that ?

Robert, April 01, 2003 - 5:33 pm UTC

Here:
</code> http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:::::P11_QUESTION_ID:2451893530442 <code>

You said:
>> Now, I'm not a linux admin, never used linux -- but I use solaris all of the time....

Now which Tom was THAT ?

Tom Kyte
April 01, 2003 - 8:11 pm UTC

that was Tom in 12-Jan-2002 ;)

I made the switch in August 2002 I believe (and my guess was right ;)

FUP Who said that

A reader, April 02, 2003 - 1:04 am UTC

Tom said
"I made the switch in August 2002"

Now thats a surprise , i would have thought you would have
been using it for years.

I made the switch when I had Win95 and Linux installed
on my 486DX50, boosted it to 24Mb Ram...
Ran some heavy performance tests
Win95 made no difference still a pig,
Linux made FAR better use of resources and handled much
greater loads then Win95 could


RH 8.0 - Oracle9iR2

Van Driessche Erik, April 02, 2003 - 4:13 am UTC

Hello,

I've installed OEM from the 9iR2 CD and on a Linux RH 7.3 everyting works fine. On a Linux RH 8, some features didn't work. Like The OEM prefered credentials (username/password for unix servers/ databases/ listeners who blanks out ...

Never found the reason why, but have seen this on twice different Intel based servers. Either discover nodes causes a lot of troubles on RH8, not on a RH 7.3

To Jeremy Smith:

Robert, April 07, 2003 - 10:26 am UTC

>>. I wrote up some directions for
installing 9iDBR2 and 9iASR2 on Redhat 7.3 (pretty much just a collection of what's out there on otn). I can't guarantee they're flawless, but they work for
me. I'll be putting them up on the web in the next week or so.
---------------

Jeremy, what's your URL ?

thanks
rchin@panix.com

sorry, Tom , don't know how else to find this guy.




Tom Kyte
April 07, 2003 - 2:06 pm UTC

i sent him an email...

What about Oracle Designer

T.Williamson, April 07, 2003 - 3:33 pm UTC

I really like Linux for a server, but I gave up on using it as my workstation. One of the reasons was that Oracle Designer does not come in a Linux version, and one of my clients likes designer. I also had a great deal of trouble figuring out how to get my laptop X-windows resolution to look good for over-head projection demos, fonts never did look good. Also got tired of trying to find a compatible "Office" clone with all the correct fonts etc.... Seemed like I was spending more time trying to make Linux work than getting my job done...

But I found that it compares favorably to other server OS's like Solaris and AIX.

So for me, Linux for my server and Windows for my workstation.


Tom Kyte
April 07, 2003 - 4:40 pm UTC

RH 8, with xft support -- I've got all of the "windows" fonts, using crossover office -- I have ms office for when I need it. KDE's Konsole with Lucida Console 14point bold font works awesome for infocus on a big screen.

So for me -- less and less (and soon) no ms stuff at all

7.3 instructions

Jer Smith, April 07, 2003 - 3:53 pm UTC

Here you are. Just threw them up...I wanted to put other useful stuff up to but I haven't gotten to it.
If you have improvements or the instructions don't work, please email me (the mailto link is in the doc)
</code> http://www.xmission.com/~alceste/oracle/oraclerh73install.html
(for Oracle DB)
http://www.xmission.com/~alceste/oracle/oracle9iASrh73install.html <code>
(for 9iAS Infrastructure and associated 9i DB)



Will Oracle port Designer to Linux

T.Williamson, April 07, 2003 - 5:20 pm UTC

Tom,
Do you know if Oracle plans to port Designer to Linux?
What about Discoverer?

Tom Kyte
April 07, 2003 - 6:30 pm UTC

designer, no idea -- but discoverer, it is 3tier. It is everywhere already.

Red Hat 9 Pro or Base

Robert, April 07, 2003 - 5:40 pm UTC

Im going to get RH 9 (shipping today !)...
anyone knows if I need to get the Professional edition
in order to have a better chance installing 9i
or I can get away with the cheap base edition ?

Thanks !

Redhat 9

Jeremy Smith, April 07, 2003 - 6:08 pm UTC

As far as I understand, there's no technical difference between the version branded as "professional" ($150), the regular ($40) and the free-for-download versions. Those differences are all in the support and packaging (what manuals you get), and the freebie CD.

BUT there are differences between those two versions and those branded "Enterprise Linux." If you're serious about running on Linux in production, I'd recommend those because you're going to want them for support from Redhat and Oracle.

Professional Versus Regular

Jerry, April 07, 2003 - 7:53 pm UTC

Don't think there is a difference either. The kernel and shared library versions are what matters.

Here's one thing I ran into running Linux and Oracle on low-end Intel, and it made a measurable difference on my hard disks.

</code> http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/06/29/hdparm.html <code>



9i on Glibc2.???

Robert, April 08, 2003 - 11:10 am UTC

I learned Oracle 8i is compiled against Glibc2.1.x..
what's 9i compiled against ?

Thanks

Tom Kyte
April 08, 2003 - 12:34 pm UTC

I have yet to try Oracle9i on RH 9 -- I haven't heard anything good or bad as yet (although I do know that crossover office which I depend on right now isn't on RH9 due to glibc incompatibilities so I'll be waiting a bit).

Run LINUX from CD-ROM

Robert, April 09, 2003 - 12:08 pm UTC

For those guys itching to get a feel of LINUX,
check out "knoppix" at...
</code> http://www.knoppix.org <code>

Runs right from the CD-ROM...Wheee

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 2.1 (DE)

David, May 15, 2003 - 10:36 am UTC

I have been using the developer edition (Destin) of RHEL AS 2.1 With a $60 USD subscription you can down load the ISOs for DE from their web site. After that follow the directions for Oracle 9i Release 2 on Linux in the latest Release notes.

I found that it is useful to set the ulimit on stacks to 2048 when installing. (ksh) (ulimit -s 2048)
It prevents a hangup in dbca and netca.

Upgrade on box with Oracle installed

Robert, June 23, 2003 - 5:12 pm UTC

>>I am using Redhat linux version 8.0 (after upgrading from 7.2 to 7.3...).

Tom,
do you have Oracle installed on that box ? (dumb me..of course...)
Is Oracle in separate partition from Linux ?

Thanks

Tom Kyte
June 24, 2003 - 7:28 am UTC

yes, oracle is installed on this machine, in /usr/oracle.

9i on Glibc2.???

Raj, July 24, 2003 - 9:41 am UTC

Hi Tom,

I installing the Oracle 9i release 1 Enterprise Edition on Redhat Linux 9 personal edition.

When I start the runInstaller there is a glibc2.2 error. But I do not find RH has provided the same on the installation disks.

Do you have any idea where could i download the same.

Regards

Tom Kyte
July 24, 2003 - 3:51 pm UTC

totally not supported

totally not working



Oracle 9i in Red Hat 8

apl, August 12, 2003 - 8:29 am UTC

I can't start the oracle 9i installation in RedHat 8.0.i am getting the error
'Java RunTime Environment was not found at E/bin/java.Hence, the oracle universal installer cannot be run'.
i downloaded the JRE version 1.3.1 and set its path. but still i am getting the error?

Tom Kyte
August 12, 2003 - 9:01 am UTC

I had no problems in that environment -- you are running ./runInstaller from the local directory right.

Still the same error

apl, August 14, 2003 - 12:41 am UTC

I've copied the contents of all the 3 disks in different folders in the local directory. I've installed jre 1.3.1_09
and set the jre path to the bin directory (/usr/local/jre1.3.1_09/bin). Still the same error.

Tom Kyte
August 14, 2003 - 7:54 am UTC

sorry, contact support. we use our own jre during the install...

I've never had an issue, not sure what to tell you.

to apl of India

Robert, August 14, 2003 - 9:59 am UTC

Why is it necessary for you to copy from disks ?
My installation from CD-ROM was so smooth I was actually surprised 3+ old PIII ($150 ;), RH8.0 ($0 ;), 9iR2 ($0 ;), JDev($0 ;) (Thanks Tom for reminding us that one can do PL/SQL stuff with this cross-platform tool)

Did you do some homework ?

Here are 2 links to docs that's pretty comprehensive:
</code> http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle9i.shtml http://www.xmission.com/~alceste/oracle/oraclerh73install.html <code>

oracle 8.1.6 on Redhat 8.0

APL, August 22, 2003 - 12:28 am UTC

Is it possible to install oracle 8.1.6 on RedHat 8.0.if so can you give me the documents for installation.

Tom Kyte
August 22, 2003 - 8:44 am UTC

don't know. 816 is so out of support as it is.

if you want to use really old software for one piece, you must be willing to use really old software and in many cases, old hardware for the rest.

problem in starting database creation

APL, August 28, 2003 - 9:15 am UTC

I installed oracle 8.1.6 in red hat linux 8.0. after installation at the time of database creation i am getting the following error.
oracleora8:relocation error :/ora8......./lib/libjox.so:
undefined symbol:--fixunssfd.
What will be the problem


Tom Kyte
August 29, 2003 - 7:34 am UTC

if you want to use really really old unsupported database software, you must expect to use really really old unsupported operating system software as well.

since RH 8.0 did not even exist when 816 was coded -- don't know what to tell you. You might be able to "hack it" to work but it won't be a very stable configuration.

need to use software that was written with eachother in mind...

setting preferred credentials

Jitender, August 29, 2003 - 10:55 am UTC

I have oracle 9.2 on RH8 on my laptop.I have problem setting the preferred credentials on OEM.It dosen't get saved.Is it a bug? How can we trace what is happening ?

To Learn Linux

Sikandar Hayat, August 30, 2003 - 1:09 pm UTC


I am also trying to lear Linux these days and want to migrate from Win to Linux. I am taking help forum
</code> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ <code>



For help with Oracle on RedHat..

Harish, September 03, 2003 - 11:27 am UTC

I have succesfully managed to install Oracle 9i onto my GNU/Debian(Woody) box.

For those of you who are having some problems with your install, check: </code> http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle9i.shtml <code>

The help provided on this is specific to Redhat, but is also applicable to other distro's also. I used it to install on Debian after all ;-).

Hope this helps if you are having problems...
Harish

Not certified.

Sikandar Hayat, September 08, 2003 - 11:41 pm UTC


"I am using Redhat linux version 8.0 (after upgrading from 7.2 to 7.3...)."

TOM as per my info these version are not certified for Oracle installation. Only RH 7.1 and AS 2.1 are certified but as you are using these version of RH then what kind of problems we may face if we don't install on 7.1 or 2.1AS?

Tom Kyte
September 09, 2003 - 11:30 am UTC


don't know, never did it. using certified supported configurations lets you use support. using a non-supported configuration will make it harder to use support.

any production system on REDHAT LINUX ORACLE-9i2 ??

linux, September 15, 2003 - 10:53 am UTC

Are anybody using oracle 9i-2 on redhat enterprise linux- AS 2.1 (kernel 2.4.9-e.3, glibc 2.2.4-26 )in your production system? If yes ,are you using intel X86 compatible or intel Itanium 2 systems? Which machine are you using ? If you are using any other version of Linux oracle in your production system please let us know here.Thanks!

Great history

Wayne, September 17, 2003 - 12:51 pm UTC

I really enjoyed the historical aspect of this thread.

Specifially for Raj's question, installing oracle 8i on Redhat requires that you change the header files - they are at the download location.

Being newer to linux, I would appreciate Tom letting me contact some of the people he knows that are running 9ias on linux.

Thanks!

We are using Oracle9iR2 production system on Linux

A reader, September 25, 2003 - 6:24 pm UTC

To "linux from Richmond,verrginia,USA", we are using Oracle 9.2.0.2 on RedHat Linux 7.1, with customized kernel 2.4.19 (I compiled the kernel myself), glibc-2.2.2-10, and (last but not least) a special version of binutils (binutils-2.10.91.0.4-1 needed at installation). The CPU is 1 GHz dual Intel Pentium III (quite lame by today's standard). We have used it for two years by now (initial installation was 9iR1 [9.0.1]). There were some problems with 9iR1. With 9iR2 it has been almost flawless. Now it's a 500 GB data warehouse.

9iAS on Linux

Wayne, October 08, 2003 - 9:53 am UTC

I am interested in someone sharing some knowledge about using RH or SUSE for a test install of 9iAS rel 2.

Any takers?

some question on linux configuration

A reader, November 30, 2003 - 1:56 pm UTC

HiTom
Hope you had a great thanxgiving! I have some
quick questions.

Do you have 10g installed on your laptop?
I am thinking of buying a dell laptop and installing
10G (or 10gbeta) on it.
However, I am not sure how much power
(specifially cpu and RAM) should be ok. Most likely
my laptop will come with windows (bcos I dont think
we get linux bundled laptops directly) so i would
be partitioning it to install linux.
Can you kindly share with us what your laptop config
is, in terms of the following?
cpu,
memory,
hard disk
linux version

Also, are there any concerns if i also install 9i on the
same box (apart from needing more hard disk space). Mostly
only one of them (1oG or 9i) will be up at a time.

Many thanx!:)


Tom Kyte
November 30, 2003 - 2:32 pm UTC

Yes I do have 10g

I'm running RHAS3.0 right now -- but windows will work as well (or RHAS2.1)

I have a 1.6ghz Mobile Pentium with 1gig of RAM, 60gig hard disk and RedHat Advanced Server 3.0

I have 9iR1 and 9iR2 on the same, all living happily (amazing how easy things can be without that copyprotection stuff -- ooppps, meant the registry of course. I started hating windows when I couldn't just copy most programs from one place to another since they were so deeply intertwined with the registry. I loved ini files, seem to be making a comeback in the form of XML configuration files :)



thank you Tom!

A reader, November 30, 2003 - 2:43 pm UTC

One more quick question - Do you know if I can directly
get RHAS3.0 in my laptop instead of windows (I dont think
I will need Windows for my purposes)? Or do i have to
get windows, partition - bla bla..

Apologize for being slightly off-topic and have a great
day!! Please keep up the great work - you are the best!

Tom Kyte
November 30, 2003 - 7:43 pm UTC

no idea, the first thing I do with a new laptop these days is

a) reformat the disk
b) install linux


it is up to the people selling to you...

start oracle automatically

Nikunj N. Thaker, December 01, 2003 - 6:28 am UTC

Hi tom,

I have oracle ee 9.2 and redhat linux professional 9.
i had try to start oracle automatically.

i had created a orastart file in /opt/ora9/product/9.2/ as below

#!/bin/bash

su - oracle << EOF
lsnrctl start
sqlplus "/ as sysdba" << EOF
startup
exit
EOF


i had changed the owner of the file to root.
i had created soft link of the file in directory init.d,rc3.d,rc0.d but still oracle can't start automaticaly.

in command line if i type ./orastart it works fine.

At present i am evaluting oracle on linux i don't have much expertize on linux so pls. guide me in detail.

Regards,
Nikunj

Tom Kyte
December 01, 2003 - 7:18 am UTC

you have EOF in there way too much.


in /etc/init.d create a script "mystartup"

in there just put

su - oracle -c orastart


that is the script you want to link to in rc3.d, then in $ORACLE_HOME/bin, create orastart

lsnrctl start
sqlplus "/ as sysdba" << EOF
startup
exit
EOF



thats all.

start oracle automatically

Nikunj N. Thaker, December 02, 2003 - 7:28 am UTC

hi tom,
thanks i had follow ur steps but can't get success.
ur first steps in /etc/init.d create a script "mystartup"
i had created

[root@nikunj 9.2]# cd /etc/init.d/
[root@nikunj init.d]# ls -la myorastart
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           36 Dec  2 11:06 myorastart
[root@nikunj init.d]# cat myorastart
#!/bin/bash
su - oracle -c orastart

ur second steps 
[root@nikunj init.d]# cd /etc/rc3.d/
[root@nikunj rc3.d]# ls -la myorastart
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           22 Dec  2 11:07 myorastart -> /etc/init.d/myorastart

ur third steps
[root@nikunj rc3.d]# cd $ORACLE_HOME/bin
[root@nikunj bin]# ls -la orastart
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           73 Dec  2 11:27 orastart
[root@nikunj bin]# cat orastart
#!/bin/bash

lsnrctl start
sqlplus "/ as sysdba" << EOF
startup
exit
EOF

but still my oracle can't start automatically i have to type mannually myorastart on terminal.

[root@nikunj root]# cd /etc/init.d/
[root@nikunj init.d]# cat myorastart
#!/bin/bash
su - oracle -c orastart
[root@nikunj init.d]# ./myorastart

LSNRCTL for Linux: Version 9.2.0.1.0 - Production on 02-DEC-2003 18:04:49

Copyright (c) 1991, 2002, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Starting /opt/ora9/product/9.2/bin/tnslsnr: please wait...

TNSLSNR for Linux: Version 9.2.0.1.0 - Production
System parameter file is /opt/ora9/product/9.2/network/admin/listener.ora
Log messages written to /opt/ora9/product/9.2/network/log/listener.log
Listening on: (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=ipc)(KEY=EXTPROC)))
Listening on: (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST=nikunj.bppl.com)(PORT=1521)))

Connecting to (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=IPC)(KEY=EXTPROC)))
STATUS of the LISTENER
------------------------
Alias                     LISTENER
Version                   TNSLSNR for Linux: Version 9.2.0.1.0 - Production
Start Date                02-DEC-2003 18:04:49
Uptime                    0 days 0 hr. 0 min. 0 sec
Trace Level               off
Security                  OFF
SNMP                      OFF
Listener Parameter File   /opt/ora9/product/9.2/network/admin/listener.ora
Listener Log File         /opt/ora9/product/9.2/network/log/listener.log
Listening Endpoints Summary...
  (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=ipc)(KEY=EXTPROC)))
  (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST=nikunj.bppl.com)(PORT=1521)))
Services Summary...
Service "OEMREP.bppl.com" has 1 instance(s).
  Instance "OEMREP", status UNKNOWN, has 1 handler(s) for this service...
Service "PLSExtProc" has 1 instance(s).
  Instance "PLSExtProc", status UNKNOWN, has 1 handler(s) for this service...
Service "ora9i" has 1 instance(s).
  Instance "ora9i", status UNKNOWN, has 1 handler(s) for this service...
The command completed successfully

SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production on Tue Dec 2 18:04:49 2003

Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Connected to an idle instance.

SQL> ORACLE instance started.

Total System Global Area  235999352 bytes
Fixed Size                   450680 bytes
Variable Size             201326592 bytes
Database Buffers           33554432 bytes
Redo Buffers                 667648 bytes
Database mounted.
Database opened.
SQL> Disconnected from Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.1.0 - Production
[root@nikunj init.d]#

Regards,
Nikunj 

Tom Kyte
December 02, 2003 - 9:16 am UTC

you need to link to it properly.

look at the names of the other scripts in there

S10network

for exmaple -- S for "start" 10 for "after 9, before 11"


link to it as S99local for example. (and get a linux admin book! :)


Informative, diverse thread

Fraser Talbot, December 02, 2003 - 10:02 am UTC

This thread gives a full array of perspectives of using Oracle on Linux.

Oracle9iAS in RH8.0

Karthik, December 02, 2003 - 12:40 pm UTC

Tom
I believe Oracle9iAS is supported only in RH7.3 and RHAS version.

Could you please suggest Application Server to use with Oracle9i in RH8.0?

Thanks

Tom Kyte
December 02, 2003 - 12:50 pm UTC

well, since Oracle9i itself is not "supported" on RH8.0.....

I am now using RHAS3.0 and 2.1 on all machines.

10G download?

A reader, December 05, 2003 - 11:10 am UTC

Hi Tom
You mentioned you have installed 10G on your
laptop. Did you get it from an internal site or
is 10G available for download to general
developer community?
Can you provide us with the url for downloading
10g?

thanx a bunch!

Tom Kyte
December 05, 2003 - 11:27 am UTC

not yet, think "christmas present"

it is beta still.

How to start/shutdown oracle automatically

Nikunj Thaker, December 20, 2003 - 5:48 am UTC

How to start/shutdown oracle automatically

Place the below script in /etc/rc.d/init.d with name oracle
#!/bin/sh
#
# Startup/shutdown script for the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS).
#
# Linux chkconfig stuff:
#
# chkconfig: 2345 90 10
# description: Startup/shutdown script for the Oracle 9i Database
#
#

# Source function library.
if [ -f /etc/init.d/functions ] ; then
. /etc/init.d/functions
elif [ -f /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions ] ; then
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
else
exit 0
fi

DAEMON=oracle

prog=oracle

start () {
echo -n $"Starting $prog: "
su - oracle -c orastart
RETVAL=$?
# start daemon
echo "Oracle Started."
[ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/oracle
return $RETVAL
}

stop () {
# stop daemon
echo -n "Stopping $prog: "
su - oracle -c orastop
RETVAL=$?
echo "Oracle Stooped."
[ $RETVAL = 0 ] && rm -f /var/lock/subsys/oracle
}

restart() {
stop
start
}

case $1 in
start)
start
;;
stop)
stop
;;
restart)
restart
;;
*)

echo "Usage: $DAEMON {start|stop|restart|condrestart|reload|status}"
exit 1
esac

exit $RETVAL
chmod +x /etc/rc.d/init.d/oracle
chkconfig --add oracle
this will add files are start with S and K in respective directory as per chkconfig: 2345 90 10 here it will put files start with S90oracle in rc2.d, rc3.d, rc4.d and rc5.d and K10oracle file in rc0.d rc1.d and rc6.d.
Create file orastart and orastop as below in oracle_home/bin directory for me oracle home is /opt/ora9/product/9.2
my orastart script as below
#!/bin/bash

lsnrctl start
sqlplus "/ as sysdba" << EOF
startup
exit
EOF
my orastop script as below
#!/bin/bash

lsnrctl stop
sqlplus "/ as sysdba" << EOF
shutdown immediate
exit
EOF

beginer question

Fernando Sanchez, December 23, 2003 - 6:31 pm UTC

I've tried several times to install the 8.1.7 release on Mandrake 9.1, but when executing runInstaller nothing happens. I think I have a problem about the location of the 'jre' and the file oraparam.ini where it seems to look for it.

Any advice? Would someone recommend me something to read?

Thanks in advance.

Linux is cool

H.S.Anand, January 05, 2004 - 11:49 pm UTC

Happy New Year to you tom!

As a new year resolution, I have removed Windows (or "Windoze" as you love to call it) and have loaded R.H. Linux 8.0 (Psyche) -[I wonder why they call it that].

It has been a really easy install. Specially for a Person, who knows ZERO linux.
I have been playing around for the past week and Will be installing
Oracle 9i rel.2 Tonight.

It is great to work on a system that offers so much For FREEEEE!!

thank you for all the knowledge that you have shared with us through this forum.

Cheers!
Anand

Christmas?

A reader, January 06, 2004 - 12:23 pm UTC

>Followup:
>not yet, think "christmas present"

Christmas, 2004?

Seriously, any news on release date of 10G?


Tom Kyte
January 06, 2004 - 2:13 pm UTC

"soon"

think before valentines day.

Here it is...

Sikandar Hayat, February 09, 2004 - 11:39 am UTC

Monday, February 9, 2004
Download Oracle Database 10g
Oracle Database 10g software and documentation are now available: Download the software and documentation
Explore Oracle By Example hands-on tutorials
Get technical information at the Oracle Database 10g Product Center

</code> http://otn.oracle.com/index.html <code>

10g on Fedora / Redhat 9 ?

Chris, February 11, 2004 - 4:12 pm UTC

Will Oracle 10g run on Redhat versions later than 8.0 or 8.1, i.e. on the current Freeware Redhat linux, "Fedora"?

I know that it's certified only on the expensive Redhat OSs, or 8.x versions. But some guys seem to have Oracle 9i running on newer versions of Redhat, by tweaking a few things.


Tom Kyte
February 11, 2004 - 5:20 pm UTC

10g is supported on RH AS 2.1 and 3.0 only.

"expensive" is sort of a relative term is it not? I mean - you either want a supported, supportable, consistent, implementable platform or -- not.

Oracle on Fedora/Redhat

A reader, February 11, 2004 - 11:43 pm UTC

Tom I disagree with you 100% Infact you need to check the facts on Distributions that Oracle 10g is supporting. UnitedLinux (one of 3 distros oracle supports) for all practical purposes is no more supported than Redhat9 or Fedora (</code> http://news.com.com/2100-7344-5146194.html

Oracle is definitely going to alienate big companies like Novell and small companies like mine by supporting either dead Linux (United Linux)-- which btw was one of SCO's Initiative-- or $4000 version of free software(Redhat 3).

Given the resources and apparent Linux dedication Oracle implies, it either needs to become distribution independent and become Kernel dependent especially since oracle install is not FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) dependent. Or create its own free distribution--which ain't rocket science.

What baffles me is that 10g runs just fine on Fedora and about 2 other "un"supported distributions i tested..So why all this fuss?? 

Them marketing folks sure know something we techies just don't get...

Now Tom I know you like to give Windows ME example but that case was different, unlike that desktop version of windows almost all Linux distributions offer Server Configurations and are widely used by big and small companies on workstations, in development, for testing and production systems.

Comparing Windows versions with Linux Distributions is just as naive as comparing Oracle to Ximian.

Im refering to your comments here 
http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:::::P11_QUESTION_ID:12257624552691, <code>


Tom Kyte
February 12, 2004 - 8:34 am UTC

thats cool. you are allowed to disagree.

it however won't change the reality of things.

we support two linux distributions

red hat, popular in the US.
united, popular in Europe (and far far far from "dead")

please don't clump me in with "we techies" -- cause I know what it takes to support "real software" running "real systems".



Start with

Marcio, February 25, 2004 - 10:27 pm UTC

Tom, I'm going to install linux on my home, just to prove migration facts, performance stuff, etc... I didn't want spend money with, so wich would be the costless linux distribution certified by Oracle to training 8i (8.1.7), 9i (9.2.0) and 10g ?
Thanks,

Tom Kyte
February 26, 2004 - 8:57 am UTC

we officially support RH ES and RH AS:

</code> http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/ <code>

so, to have a supportable platform -- you'll need to buy an OS. It can be installed on other "free" ports, but there will be gotchas and workarounds.

* Oracle will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES on any platform or driver(s) that Red Hat supports. It is a requirement that the OS (binary) has not been modified.

* Red Hat Enterprise Linux : Red Hat Enterprise Linux (version 2.1 and version 3) family includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS. Oracle products are supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES ONLY.

* UNITED LINUX 1.0: Oracle will continue to work closely with UnitedLinux and provide customer support for UnitedLinux 1.0, throughout its life cycle. The products supported by Oracle, as part of UnitedLinux, include Conectiva powered by UnitedLinux 1.0, Turbolinux powered by UnitedLinux 1.0 and SuSE SLES8.




On Mandrake 10.0 ?

Wes, April 08, 2004 - 11:57 am UTC

I would like to explore 10g on the 2.6 kernel, but runInstaller won't get beyond the fact that it's not a Redhat or UnitedLinux release even after I editted the oraparam.ini and /etc/issue files (if I spent to the time to download three CD's of stuff from Oracle, I'm not giving up without a little cheating). Do I have to manually copy files around or is there a saner workaround?

THX,
Wes

Tom Kyte
April 08, 2004 - 3:24 pm UTC

there is a very sane workaround

use the supported and only supportable operating systems. that would be the only thing you would be able to run it on for production, no sense in playing games with it.

sure, you can search around for the hacks to get it going, but (IMO) that would be an utter waste of time.

you might be able to fake it out with

$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon)


or

$ ./runInstaller - ignoreSysPrereqs




Oracle on Linux Installation

Jayesh, June 02, 2004 - 5:16 am UTC

I started Oracle9i2 on Red Hat 9.0 linux. Everything went on fine till the final progess bar. At the stage of installing JRE it is showing link pending ... Copying Readme...

Then there is no activity going on in my system. I tried several times changing editions and going for custom installation.


Tom Kyte
June 02, 2004 - 8:45 am UTC

You'll have to search around (google for

oracle red hat 9.0

for example) to find the "hacks" to get it to install on a non-server platform.

The database installs and is supported on on Red Hat AS 2.1 and 3.0. I'm running 3.0 on all of my desktops and laptop myself.

what about Solaris?

Reader, June 10, 2004 - 6:15 am UTC

Hi Tom

I am new on Sun SOlaris 5.8 Platform with Oracle9i.
Can you provide me any good link of solaris which will be useful for DBAs jobs?

Regards

Tom Kyte
June 10, 2004 - 8:00 am UTC

besides the solaris admin guide and install guide that came with your software? not really.

Using Oracle 9i and Linux

Bill, June 17, 2004 - 10:47 am UTC

I built a Redhat 8 server on a dell poweredge with striping and mirrored drives. I then installed Oracle 9i and powerchute to handle power outages that empty the UPS.

Except for applying the standard database patches from oracle, this production server has not been down for three years and has been the most stable oracle server we have. (Windows 2000 advanced server, Sun Solaris) I would strongly recommend using Linux and Oracle for anyone out there.

SUSE 9.0

Gj, July 02, 2004 - 9:36 am UTC

I finally made the switch to Lin from Win Jan 2004. I kept dithering between the two. I messed my XP up and switched to Linux to get some work done and never got around to re-installing XP.

Couple of usefuls...

If it's your first install, get a stable kit either buy a box set or download and burn from. Personal editions are usually about $30, but you will get manuals to help through those first few days. Stick to RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake or Debian, the last three are very Euro centric whereas RH is bit more "worldwide".

If possible install the whole kit from the DVD/CDs then you can play with all the options and settle on what you like and you will have less problems with any dependencies.

My company insists that you must use Windows over their VPN (urgh), so I bought VMWARE, copied their standard build into it and whenever I want to "dial-in" to work I simply fire up W2K in a window connect, work, logout and freeze the machine in it's std state.

Oracle 9i is a dodle to install on the big name distros, some minor niggle with libraries but nothing a savvy IT person couldn't figure out quickly.

I have installed 10g on SUSE 9.0 Pro, it compiled and ran, but with only 512M memory it was a tad slow but usuable. Obviously unsupported but that's what Linux is all about, doing something least expected.

If you get stuck, google for an answer and 99% of the time you will find someone who has already fixed your problem and offered advice.

Get FireFox Mozilla web browser, nothing beats it at the moment!

Above all start to enjoy using computers again, enjoy the freedom from Virus', spyware, constant security problems. Heavens SUSE comes with telnet disabled by default, you are forced to use SSH for secure connections to Unix boxes, now if only MS would learn lessons like these....






Oracle Developer

Dawar, July 29, 2004 - 12:06 pm UTC

Tom,

Here is a Linux/Oracle question and I do not aspect 100% correct answer from you.
But there is always a good chance that you know very well.

I have installed SuSE Linux Enterprise Server8(x86) on my box.
I will install Oracle Database 10g on it.

In my installation process I have created below partitions.

Extended, Boot. Root & Swap.

But now when I run this command to see information about all mounted file systems its gives me as below:

df -k

Filesystem**1K-blocks**Used*****Available**Use%**Mountedon
----------**---------**----*****---------**----**----------
/dev/hdc1***15488716***2329744**12372192***16%*****/
/dev/hdc2***101107*****8781*****87105******10%*****/boot
shmfs*******256812*****0********256812*****0%******/dev/shm

But I can not see my extended partion for the disk.
Do I need to mount my extended partion?
If yes how?

Tom Kyte
July 29, 2004 - 1:33 pm UTC

sorry -- don't know what you did exactly, so I'm not going to comment -- seems you created an "extended partition" physically on disk but have not formatted it as a file system perhaps.

Oracle Developer

Dawar, August 10, 2004 - 5:19 pm UTC

Tom,

Thanks for your earlier feed back.
You were right.
Extended partition was not formated to the file system.

Now here is another question.

I have installed SuSE Linux Ent Server 8 prior to install Oracle 10g.

Suppose:
My hard drive size is 60 GB.
My RAM is 512 MB.

Could you please tell me the idle file system?

In which directory I should install Oracle Database? etc

I am especially confused between the sizes for home & opt.
I got two different opinions from two individuals.
Here is the first feed back.
Is it correct?

"/opt is where you install oracle by default. If this is your home computer, then 3G is OK. If not then increase /opt to 30G and set /home
to 3G. Oracle datafile are installed in /opt in sub directory."

Other feed back is opposite to it.

some thing like that (feel free to modify)

Devices Mount Sizes File Type
---------------------------------------------------
/dev/hda1 extended
/dev/hda5 / boot 305.9 MB ext2
/dev/hda6 / 3.0 GB Resiser or Ext 3
/dev/hda7 /usr 10 GB Resiser or Ext 3
/dev/hda8 /var 2 GB Resiser or Ext 3
/dev/hda9 /opt 3 GB Resiser or Ext 3
/dev/hda10 /home 30 GB Resiser or Ext 3
/dev/hda11 /local 1GB Resiser or Ext 3
/dev/hda12 Swap 6.5GB Swap

Regards,
Dawar




Tom Kyte
August 10, 2004 - 7:33 pm UTC

if that is a single disk, put it where ever you like, it won't affect a thing.

I put mine into /home/ora10g, /home/ora9ir2, /home/ora9ir1 -- it made me 'feel good'. I just have one physical disk.

10g RAC with Redhat AS 3.0

sami, August 10, 2004 - 10:40 pm UTC

Dear Tom,

I am trying to set up 10g RAC using Firewire Shared Disk.
I setup everything as per
</code> http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle10gRAC.shtml <code>

But when I install 10g CRS on Node-1, sometime it is not getting coped to Node-2, sometime partially it is getting coped (few directories missing).

What could be wrong here? scp,ssh works without password prompt.

Where to get red hat linux 9 from

A reader, August 11, 2004 - 12:01 am UTC

Hello everyone,
Can anyone pls post the link to get red hat linux 9. I went to the red hat linux official site.Did not find it there.
Am I supposed to download fedora instead ?
Is it equivalent to red hat linux 9..just the next higher rel.
I am looking for a free downloadable version.
Thanx



Tom Kyte
August 11, 2004 - 9:43 am UTC

fedora is the "totally free thing"

</code> http://fedora.redhat.com/ <code>

A reader, August 11, 2004 - 7:46 am UTC

I couldn't find the free download on the redhat site either. Fortunately, the isos are mirrored in lots of places. Not all of these links work though.

</code> http://www.linuxhelp.net/isos/ <code>


any link for red hat 9 specifically( and free)

A reader, August 11, 2004 - 2:42 pm UTC

As I want to install Oracle 9.2 on it.I heard there are lot of issues with linux and oracle install.
A friend recomended a site from oreilly.com where you just need to close your eyes and follow the steps blindly.That works for red hat 9.So afraid to use FEDORA.
I am a newbie to linux.Infact I will just start using linux after I get hold of red hat 9

Linux ISO for old versions of Linux

Jer Smith, August 13, 2004 - 3:34 am UTC

</code> http://www.linuxiso.org <code>

Oracle 9.2.0.4 on Linux

George Johnson, August 13, 2004 - 6:09 pm UTC

I recently had to install Oracle/Linux and I found it very easy. I used SUSE 9.1 Pro distro, but they are almost all the same. There was one small problem with 9.2.0.4 on the latest distros. The Oracle installer has a small problem with a missing library, but Oracle has a patch for it. After that I had not probs at all.

Check out this site, almost every problem you will find and solutions to getting Oracle up and running on a Linux install:

</code> http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle9i.html <code>

Gj

Oracle Developer

Dawar, August 20, 2004 - 12:12 pm UTC

Tom,

You gave me following feed back above for the directory structure for the installation of Oracle database 10g on a sigle disk for the SuSE Linux:


Followup:
if that is a single disk, put it where ever you like, it won't affect a thing.

I put mine into /home/ora10g, /home/ora9ir2, /home/ora9ir1 -- it made me 'feel
good'. I just have one physical disk.


Here is the note from Oracle Quick Installation Guide Book along with 10g CD Packs:

Note: If you do not want to create a separate Oracle datafile directory, you can install the datafiles in a subdirectory of the Oracle base directory
(not recommended for production databases).

So what I understand from above is to create spearate directory for datafiles. is it correct?

Note: By default oracle install software in /opt/oracle.

So is it fine to install datafile in /home/oradata?

Note:

Later I need to exp/imp from Oracle 7.3.4 to Oracle 10g.

What is your suggestion now?

Please tell me which directory needs larger space and why?



cheers,
Dawar


Tom Kyte
August 21, 2004 - 10:53 am UTC

it is fine to put the files anywhere that makes you feel good in a setup like this.

for me -- on my laptop -- i use $ORACLE_HOME/oradata/$ORACLE_SID as the place for the datafiles for each test database. that way, when I get bored with having 9ir1 on my laptop -- I can just rm -rf /home/ora9ir1 and poof -- software, datafiles, etc are gone.


you can exp from 73 and import into 10g.


there is no directory that "needs larger space" -- don't really know what you mean by that. if you have one disk -- you should really have one partition so all directories can get as big as they want to be.

[tkyte@tkyte-pc-isdn tkyte]$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 74807888 46108044 24899812 65% /
/dev/hda1 102454 14931 82233 16% /boot
none 1030804 0 1030804 0% /dev/shm
[tkyte@tkyte-pc-isdn tkyte]$


I have one disk -- all of it is on / pretty much. no sense in partitioning it.

opensource oracle

Praveen Sehgal, September 10, 2004 - 9:41 pm UTC

Tom,
I had always thought it would be nice if oracle would opensource a limited version of oracle and since sybase went opensource I think Oracle should consider opening personal oracle (atleast befor DB2 goes open). Can you imagine how much easier it'll be for Oracle to beta test new features, collect bugs and speed up production cycles..and thousands of applications that rely on mysql can now be migrated to more feature rich and stable database and perhaps integrated with oracle's applications not to mention how much easier it'll be to find good oracle talent.It'll also prove that oracle's support for linux is not just to sell closed-source software on top of open source OS.

What do you think?

</code> http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/09/0556229&tid=221&tid=1&tid=106 <code>

Tom Kyte
September 11, 2004 - 8:10 am UTC

I think the sybase thing is a smokescreen -- that was the old watcom/386 DOS based database they bought years ago. It isn't "sybase"

I fail to see how this would make it easier to beta test new features (we have quite the comprehensive beta program as it is), collect bugs and speed up production cycles. We already have a couple thousand hands in the pot as it is. Nor do I see why this would make it any more possible (or less) to migrate to a more feature rich and stable database.

Some people seem to attribute some "magical mystical qualities" to all things "opensource". open source is not nirvana, it is not the only model, it is just a model.

Oracle on RHEL 3.0

Sanjaya Balasuriya, September 15, 2004 - 9:55 am UTC

Hi Tom,

Have you ever installed Oracle 8.1.7 on RedHat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 3.0 ? Is it possible ?

Oracle says it&#347; possible to install Oracle 8i on RHEL AS 2.1. But I could not find any news about RHEL AS 3.0.

I'm trying to install an Oracle 8i client on RHEL AS 3.0 just to export few 8i database. The AS 3.0 server already has a 9iR2 installation too. If I can install 8i client on this AS 3.0 server, then I can export (as backups) all the databases from on server.

Any good news for me ?

Thanks in advance.

-San

Tom Kyte
September 15, 2004 - 10:12 am UTC

nope, not a supported configuration

if you want to use the way back machine, you have to way back everything -- OS, database, everything.


just upgrade the 8i images (upgrade the database)


or, use export on the machines that are running the 8i stuff and ftp the file.

or, just use dblinks and copy what you want.

Oracle 10g Works on SUSE 9.2 Professional

Kevin, December 04, 2004 - 9:43 am UTC

I wanted to let everyone know that installing Oracle 10g on SUSE 9.2 Pro went fine. I had tried to install it on Debian and Fedora Core 3 before deciding to try SUSE.

I just followed the documentation provided by Oracle, but I installed under the oracle user created (/home/oracle), instead of under the root partition. I had one warning about the shared memory size (even though I think I had it configured correctly). I didn't have to use any hacks or work-arounds.

My reason for installing on a unsupported platform was simply that this is my laptop and doesn't have to be production ready. I use it for testing SQL, development, etc. I've been using it for over a week now with no issues at all.

Book on linux

dharma, January 28, 2005 - 3:05 am UTC

Hi Tom,

I have seen once in a while you suggest some good books in the front page. There was once a Linux book you suggested - if I am right - either you reviewed or you knew the author from Oracle. Could you please let me know what book it was. I know I should have noted down :(

Thanks.
dharma

Tom Kyte
January 28, 2005 - 7:23 am UTC

Oracle Database 10g Linux Administration
by Wim Coekaerts

Thanks

dharma, January 28, 2005 - 1:01 pm UTC

as always.
-dharma

oracle 9i in Red Hat Enterprise linux 3

ayion, March 27, 2005 - 11:45 am UTC

hi Tom,
Do you ever install oacle 9i in rhel 3 ? after a hard work i am able to see the orace universal installer screen and i select everything as needed for oracle 9i at rhel 3 but when starting packeges installation at that time of builtin jdk for oracle stop installation just show me link pending. i tried it in 4 PC's but getting the same result. do you have any solution for me? i want a result.
ayion

Tom Kyte
March 27, 2005 - 12:17 pm UTC

9i, yes, have it running. Out of the box install, nothing fancy at all. Red Hat Advanced Server 3.0

Please contact support for installation/configuration assistance. I am not aware of any widespread installation issues of the server on RHAS 3.0.


Certify on metalink has this to say:

Certify - Additional Info Oracle Database - Enterprise Edition Version 9.2 On Linux (x86)

Operating System: Linux (x86) Version Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES 3
Oracle Database - Enterprise Edition Version 9.2
N/A Version N/A
Status: Certified

Existing patch sets:
9.2.0.2
9.2.0.3
9.2.0.4
9.2.0.5
9.2.0.6

* The following requirements are needed for a successful installation of Oracle 9iR2 (9.2.0.1) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

* 1. Software:
o Linux kernel version would be 2.4.21-4.EL
o Glibc Version Number glibc 2.3.2-95.3
o Required OS Components
- compat-db-4.0.14.5
- compat-gcc-7.3-2.96.122
- compat-gcc-c++-7.3-2.96.122
- compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.122
- compat-libstdc++-devel-7.3-2.96.122
- openmotif21-2.1.30-8.i386.rpm
- setarch-1.3-1
* 2. Environment:
o Put gcc296 and g++296 first in $PATH variable by creating the following symbolic links. These are required for the relinking of some Oracle binaries (as root)
% mv /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc323
% mv /usr/bin/g++ /usr/bin/g++323
% ln -s /usr/bin/gcc296 /usr/bin/gcc
% ln -s /usr/bin/g++296 /usr/bin/g++
o hostname command should return the fully qualified hostname as shown below:
- % hostname
- hostname.domainname
o If any Java packages are installed on the system, unset the Java environment variables, for example JAVA_HOME.
o The oracle account used to install Oracle 9.2.0.1, should not have the Oracle install related variables set by default. For example setting ORACLE_HOME, PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include Oracle binaries in .profile, .login file and /etc/profile.d should be completely avoided.
* 3. Other environment settings:
o For hugemem kernel install rpm setarch-1.0-2.i386.rpm or higher.
- % setarch i386 For uni, smp and boot kernel this step is not required.
o Define and export the environment variable LD_ASSUME_KERNEL before starting the install process:
- % export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.19

Additional Installation Steps
o Open a new terminal window
o Apply bug patch 3006854 - to resolve libcwait symbol issue before invoking Oracle installer.
o After completing above steps start ./runInstaller from 9iR2 CD 1 from shell where you have defined above variable. You may get the following two errors:
o Relink error for ins_oemagent.mk - Click ignore and complete the install. Apply the patch for Bug 3119415 after the install is completed
o ctx relinking error in ins_ctx.mk: Click ignore. This is fixed by applying 9.2.0.4 patchset
o The installation will continue without displaying further errors.

ADDITIONAL NOTE
o For customers using asynch_io , apply bug patch 3208258.

Oracle 9i in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

A reader, March 27, 2005 - 2:52 pm UTC

Hello Ayion,

you might also have a look at Werner Puschitz's
"Oracle on Linux" Website - it helped me a lot.

</code> http://www.puschitz.com/OracleOnLinux.shtml http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle9i.shtml <code>

HTH,
Steve


essentials of linux/unix for oracle dba

anurag, April 01, 2005 - 4:32 am UTC

Dear Tom,

I am Oracle dba on windows platform. Wish to learn linux/unix too. What essentials should i learn to manage oracle on linux/unix and to harness OS application for oracle in Performance tuning. Please advise a roadmap.

regards

Tom Kyte
April 01, 2005 - 8:36 am UTC

Well, what do you do on windows that is OS specific for tuning Oracle? Beyond some file level stuff (minimal, if anything at all)

Linux vs windows app performance

Alex, April 01, 2005 - 8:56 am UTC

Hi Tom,

I know you're suppose to be on your "vacation" now, but this question I just had to try and get in.

We hired some big shot consultant to help performance tune our app. I just learned of his plan, which is to see how our application performs in Linux, then have us move to it (from windows 2000). Let's say for arguments sake our client could do that, (they 100% cannot) does this make any sense at all? I guess maybe he is thinking Linux will use up less system resources and thus free up more for the app? Please help me understand this. Thanks.

Tom Kyte
April 01, 2005 - 9:17 am UTC

If I have no linux experience in my shop, If I haven't the linux licenses, If I haven't the linux install base, I cannot imagine why I would move to linux just because.

On the face of it -- with just the information above -- I would not be inclined to accept their plan. I would be inclined to ask them "why".

As much as I really like Linux/Unix -- changing an operating system is not my first step in a "find out what is wrong and fix it" process.


reply

Alex, April 01, 2005 - 9:37 am UTC

This is probably a case of, "yeah it might help, it might not. If there's a performance problem with your app then you have code that needs to be fixed."

I just know absolutely nothing about Linux so I was giving this guy the benefit of the doubt and maybe he knows something I don't.

Redhat Linux and ORacle 10g

Mike, April 10, 2005 - 2:34 pm UTC

Hi Tom,
I see a lot of discussion here about SUSE Linux and Redhat Linux. I know you've been using Redhat since it was a free download. However, it's no longer free (unless you count Fedora).

I would like to install Redhat linux and Oracle 10g on new desktop PC I have at home; no dual boot, no windows, just linux. I'd like to produce a development and learning environment for myself. I do not have access to Linux at work. Right now, the existing Unix and Windows support groups are battling over who will support Linux when we do get it; it could get bloody.

What is the cheapest version of Redhat Linux that I can use for Oracle 10g for home use(no RAC at the moment)? I have downloaded RH Enterprise Linux AS 4 for free 30 day evaluation, but it seems the standard price for this is $1499, a home budget buster. Will the $349 basic version of ES 4.0 work for Oracle? Thanks very much for any insight you can give me on this.



Tom Kyte
April 10, 2005 - 2:39 pm UTC

(and I always "bought" mine -- it was never free)

why not give this a go?

</code> http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/start/db.html <code>

I use vmware on my laptop for playing (i have some headless linux boxes at home and work as well that I vnc into)

10g OBE on OTN!

Mike, April 10, 2005 - 3:59 pm UTC

I've used VMWARE's combination of 10g RAC on Linux that I got from Oracle World. It was a 90 day trial and mine ran out in early March. I didn't know this was on OTN!

Thanks very much Tom.



How to choose a Linux distribution for running Oracle

Flemming G. Jensen, April 10, 2005 - 4:55 pm UTC

You are able to get Oracle DB or Application Server to run on almost any kernel 2.4 or 2.6 version Linux distribution you prefer. But of course you will not get a certified installation except when you choose RHEL ES/AS, SUSE or AsiaLinux.
As long as you run Oracle for educational purposes on a PC or laptop you do not have to care which distribution you choose. You can buy a distribution or you can just download one for free. OTN has very good guidelines on installing Oracle on supported distributions. In the OTN Linux forum you find advices om installing Oracle on other distributions as well.
A good tips is this: Make a subscription on the Linux Magazine. It is a really nice magazine. Along with each magazine you will receive a Linux distribution nearly each time. Along with the May number came Suse 9.2 Professional. So you have a lot of choose and that is in fact what Linux is about, isn't it?

Linux Distributions and Oracle

Howard J. Rogers, April 10, 2005 - 5:13 pm UTC

Bear in mind that totally free clones of Red Hat Enterprise Server 3 and 4 exist, and run Oracle 9i and 10g just fine. (And no-one should run RAC unless it's actually called for!)

I hope Tom won't mind too much if I suggest you visit </code> http://www.dizwell.com/html/ora-inst.htm <code>for details.

Regards
HJR

Tom Kyte
April 10, 2005 - 5:18 pm UTC

Nope, I used to myself point to your rlwrap page -- you moved it, it has changed my life!

(google it if you use linux)

Check out White Box Linux

A reader, April 10, 2005 - 5:25 pm UTC

I'd try White Box Enterprise Linux, it's a free RHEL 3 clone
and Oracle 10g installs/runs seamlessly on it.

</code> http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/

For additional installation instructions:

http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle10g.shtml <code>

HTH,
Steve


Linux Distributions and Oracle

A reader, April 10, 2005 - 5:39 pm UTC

Howard's response and mine overlapped (White Box is really
a breeze :). BTW, very nice site Howard!

Regards,
Steve


Rlwrap and a command line history

Howard J. Rogers, April 10, 2005 - 11:41 pm UTC

Oh... sorry if it got moved, Tom. I could have sworn that one has kept the same page address throughout. But (another shameless plug on its way. Forgive me):

</code> http://www.dizwell.com/html/cli_history.html <code>

...should see you right.

Regards
HJR

Tom Kyte
April 11, 2005 - 8:37 am UTC

The one addition I have to that page might be....


I hate the () matching (I'm a fast touch typer and it gets in my way totally and most of my () in plus are not on the same lines)....

so, in my .bashrc I have:


export INPUTRC=~tkyte/.inputrc

and in that file:

[tkyte@localhost tkyte]$ cat .inputrc
set blink-matching-paren off




Howard

Tarry, April 13, 2005 - 6:25 am UTC

VMware GSX 3.1
Host : W2K 2000 Adv Server
Guest : WBEL 3/respin 1
DB : 9.2.0.4

Couple of little issues
1. starting up terminal gives me
bash : LD_ASSUME_KERNEL connand not found

2. DBCA strting up gives again a painfully long error

GLIBC_2.0 not defined in the..could not start the VM.

Installation of the "software" went smoothly.

What did I miss?

Figured it out :-)

Tarry, April 13, 2005 - 11:22 am UTC

compat.gcc++ WBEL 3 ,were *.128.rpm, had to replace and relink them with *.122.rpm

Solution for Oracle9i on RHEL 3 breaks Oracle10g

Matt Roth, May 06, 2005 - 5:14 pm UTC

It seems like Oracle is recommending a very poor workaround for getting Oracle9i to work on RHEL 3. By moving the default compiler and adding symbolic links causes problems with having both Oracle9i and 10g running at the same time. In addition, the symbolic links are removed during some of the OS upgrades, which breaks the ability to relink Oracle. Also, other applications on the same box may need to use the delivered version of gcc. Unfortunately, I do not think including a bad workaround adds any value.

Start databas each boot

Dawar, June 20, 2005 - 11:21 am UTC

Tom,

OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 5)
DB: Version 9.2.0.5.0

I would like to configure OS or DB to start database automtaically on each boot.

Are there any document available or please giv eme some kind of summary on it.

Regards,
Dawar

Tom Kyte
June 20, 2005 - 12:50 pm UTC

</code> http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:::::P11_QUESTION_ID:6090133761547#14053514802499 <code>

same way you would autostart anything on linux/unix...

Auto Start

Dawar Naqvi, June 22, 2005 - 11:19 am UTC

Hello Tom,

OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 5)
DB: Version 9.2.0.5.0

On your suggestion,
I have created a script "mystartup" in /etc/init.d

in there I just put

su - oracle -c orastart


that is the script I want to link to in rc3.d,
So I create a link as below:

ln -s /etc/init.d/mystartup /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S99mystartup
ln -s /etc/init.d/mystartup /etc/rc.d/rc0.d/S01mystartup


then in $ORACLE_HOME/bin,
I create script orastart

lsnrctl start
sqlplus "/ as sysdba" << EOF
startup
exit
EOF

On reboot database does not start itself but I could start DB manually by

[oracle@abc init.d]$ pwd /etc/init.d
> ./mystartup

-- Its start Database & listener both.
-- Some minor thing I am missing, any idea. Scripts are correct working fine only thing it does not starts DB automitcally on boot.

Regards,
Dawar

Auto Starts, Worked on SuSE but not on Red Hat

Dawar, June 23, 2005 - 3:20 pm UTC

Tom,

I have configured my SuSE box (belwo) and its start database and listener automitaclly.

But we do not have "orarun package" on red hat 3.0 ASas like SuSE.

So I am not succesfull Red Hat. yet???

Here what I done with SuSE Linux Eneterprise Server 8,
DB version, 10.1.0.3.0.


1) I have look first at the /etc/init.d/oracle script to see if it can fulfill our needs.

2) edited /etc/oratab and replace the ":N" with ":Y" at the end of the instance line.

3) Edited /etc/sysconfig/oracle
to have the settings:
START_ORACLE_DB="yes"
START_ORACLE_DB_LISTENER="yes"

Regards,
Dawar

Tom Kyte
June 23, 2005 - 7:05 pm UTC

well, you have my redhat configuration. it works for me. /etc/init.d scripting is reletively "the same" on all of the distributions. I can only hypothesize something is wrong in your scripting on the redhat.

(eg: it is nothing "magical" with Oracle -- script runs, we start, script doesn't run, we don't)

maybe add debug to script, like touching files, just to see if it is "running at all"

Auto Starts, Worked on SuSE but not on Red Hat , ./mystartup asked me passowrd

Dawar, June 23, 2005 - 7:52 pm UTC

Tom,

I have noticed that on Red Hat reboot,
database does not start itself but I could start DB manually by execute file mystartup as below.

But its asked me passowrd.
I have to entered my OS user password. -- (in this case oracle)

[oracle@abc init.d]$ pwd /etc/init.d
> ./mystartup
password: ..... i enetered

-- Its start Database & listener both.

So I wonder do I need to include password for Oracle user in the script?

Regards,
Dawar


Tom Kyte
June 23, 2005 - 8:38 pm UTC

if

su - oracle -c ls

asked you for a password as root, somethings "wrong". does it?

Auto Starts, Worked on SuSE but not on Red Hat , ./mystartup asked me passowrd

Dawar, June 24, 2005 - 11:11 am UTC

Tom,

Related to the above.

I have connected to my server remotely.
we have created speacial user (rem_user) who can only access remotely.
From there I can switch to any other users.
Looks to me we have a problem to connect to other user by

su - oracle -c ls.

First time I have entered oracle password and second time I eneterd root password. both not work by su - oracle -c ls command.

[rem_user@-ABDB rem_user]$ su - oracle -c ls
Password: ---I eneterd password for oracle

cli_10294.trc cli_2246.trc cli_2291.trc cli_29625.trc cli_5602.trc
cli_10296.trc cli_2249.trc cli_2300.trc cli_30804.trc cli_7907.trc
cli_10795.trc cli_2252.trc cli_2399.trc cli_30817.trc cli_7966.trc
cli_13516.trc cli_2256.trc cli_24484.trc cli_30820.trc cli_8026.trc
cli_14694.trc cli_2259.trc cli_2465.trc cli_30822.trc cursor_pm.sql
cli_15062.trc cli_2264.trc cli_2468.trc cli_4499.trc stage
cli_2133.trc cli_2269.trc cli_2501.trc cli_4501.trc
cli_2193.trc cli_2281.trc cli_2623.trc cli_4515.trc
cli_2213.trc cli_2284.trc cli_2693.trc cli_5285.trc
cli_2216.trc cli_2288.trc cli_29539.trc cli_5287.trc

[rem_user@-ABDB rem_user]$ su - oracle -c ls
Password: -- I enetered password for root
su: incorrect password
[rem_user@@-ABDB rem_user]$

But normal switching is working as below:

[rem_user@-ABDB rem_user]$ su oracle
Password:
[oracle@@-ABDB rem_user]$ exit
exit
[rem_user@-ABDB rem_user]$ su root
Password:
[root@-ABDB rem_user]# exit
exit
[rem_user@-ABDB rem_user]$

Regards,
Dawar


Tom Kyte
June 24, 2005 - 6:31 pm UTC

work with your system admin to get it working right, this is not an Oracle issue, it is a OS setup issue. You'll have to get it corrected before it works.

(i'm assuming you ran the above AS ROOT right?)

A reader, July 01, 2005 - 11:59 am UTC

Tom,

1. To install oracle on linux(ex RHAS3.0) we need RPM's gc++ etc etc, and i have noticed SA's are not comfortable installing compilers on servers(production). Do you see any issues installing compiler on production?

2. And if you see any issues can we uninstall it after installing oracle?


Thanks.



Tom Kyte
July 01, 2005 - 1:50 pm UTC

glibc has to be there at a certain version (the runtime stuff) but it has to be there for everything.

The only development tools you need are make, ar, ld, nm.

You do not need a compiler unless you want pro*c (i've not installed without one, but it is not listed as a pre-req)

</code> http://docs.oracle.com/docs/html/A96167_01/pre.htm#sthref101 <code>

Linux is becoming windows

Amit, July 03, 2005 - 4:38 pm UTC

Some of you may want to read this guys blog:

</code> http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/15056.aspx <code>

I kind of agree with him. I installed Fedora Core recently, and my first thought was - Hey, it looks like windows. I suppose I can tinker around a lot more with the OS itself, but as for it being the most exciting thing since sliced bread ? I don't know.

Tom Kyte
July 04, 2005 - 10:12 am UTC

I'm not sure anyone here would necessarily disagree with you - or him in a big way.

I always looked at linux and said "so what, it is unix with an li". It was/is not to me materially different from the sun os I used to run, only I can run it on fairly inexpensive hardware which was the draw for me (I could never afford a full up sparc for my house, but a dell poweredge, definitely)

The look and feel is to me not really even relevant. My linux boxes don't sport monitors at all - of what use is a bloated gui for a server machine in the end?

Driver issues

A reader, July 05, 2005 - 4:02 am UTC

There are a couple of reasons that make people hesistate to use Linux. One of those is probably the hardware driver problem. I myself love Linux and have tried RedHat Fedora Core 3 and Suse 9.2. The installation is easy on a decent hardware box (take for example my laptop). When I try to install any of those releases on my desktop I encounter tons of hardware compatibility issues. None of them could identify my ICHR6 SATA RAID controller and sad enough, the manufacturer only provides me with the driver for Windows. The workaround is to install Linux on a VMWare (that s what I did) but then Oracle 10g refuses to install on VMWare. If they (RH, Novel, board manufacturer, anyone....) can make Linux more compactible with desktop hardware I think Linux will attract a lot more users than now. For the time being I am thinking about getting an ATA IDE harddisk to install Linux on (yeh I refuse to give up, still want to get Suse running on my box)

Tom Kyte
July 05, 2005 - 7:34 am UTC

whoah -- Oracle 10g and VMWARE go great together and it is totally supported, in fact - we give it to you that way

</code> http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/vmware/index.html <code>

On my laptop - I'm running windows "base" with as little installed software as possible and carry a 60gig USB drive now with my vmware images on it for RAC (linux), Single instance (9ir1, 9ir2, 10gr1, 10gr2 on linux) and windows (8i, 9ir2, 10gr1).

YOU ARE RIGHT TOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A reader, July 05, 2005 - 12:37 pm UTC

Indeed VMWAre and Oracle 10g work great together!!!!!!!!! I read the docs on the link and made the neccessary changes to VMWare settings. Oracle is up and running now. The whole installation proccess took less than half an hour and was really smooth. Guess I will have plenty of exploring to do tomorrow. So Oracle on VMWare rock and can be considered as a very good option for those who want to give Linux a try.
BTW Tom, the Oracle+Suse+VMWare bundle are 2 DVDs and I am on dial up (LOL). I don t even dare to dream about downloading them. Anyway thank you very much for the precious time and effort you have spent helping me solving this trivia problem

Please help

John, August 02, 2005 - 6:51 am UTC

Hi Tom,
Is there any way in Unix to find file sizes in MB??
Any specfic "ls" command??
Your help will be appreciated.

Tom Kyte
August 02, 2005 - 8:07 am UTC

$ man ls


see if your variant doesn't support -h for human readable. (man pages are wonderful and you don't need to wait for me!)

OK

A reader, August 02, 2005 - 9:43 am UTC

Hi Tom,
Thanks for your reply.
I am using sun solaris.
It is not supporting the command ls -lh.

bash-2.03$ ls -lh
ls: illegal option -- h
usage: ls -1RaAdCxmnlogrtucpFbqisfL [files]

Any other way you can specify??

Tom Kyte
August 02, 2005 - 10:27 am UTC

$ man ls


it'll really show you what is available with your ls command, if you don't see anything there, then "no" -- find another tool (google perhaps)

How about the du command?

Craig, August 02, 2005 - 12:16 pm UTC


Tom Kyte
August 02, 2005 - 2:06 pm UTC

on solaris, it'll do it in kbytes, on linux it has the nice -h as well.

LINUX INSTALLATION PROBLEM

Lou, August 05, 2005 - 11:21 am UTC

TOM,
CAN YOU SHED LIGHT ON THIS ERROR THAT I AM GETTING WHEN
MY LINUX INSTALLATION IS 86%. I AM RUNNING REDHOT LINUX VER. 4

Error in invoking target 'all_no_orcl ihsodbc' of makefile '/u01/app/oracl e/product/10.2.0/rdbms/lib/ins_rdbms.mk'

Tom Kyte
August 05, 2005 - 1:55 pm UTC

redhot linux - gotta get me some of that!

did you check the log?

Tom I figured it out...Thanks

A reader, August 05, 2005 - 12:12 pm UTC


Your new Laptop

Marcio Portes, September 05, 2005 - 4:09 pm UTC

Tom, I "heard" you saying that in your latest laptop you've been using windows "base" and your Linux[s]/Oracle[s] over VMWare (USB/Drive).
Could you share that sort of configuration? Hardware and software (versions)... like tips!

Thanks and regards,
Marcio Portes.


Tom Kyte
September 05, 2005 - 6:54 pm UTC

I've a p4 extreme edition (hyperthreaded) with 2 gig of ram and an 80 gig internal disk.

I've put all of my vm's (vmware 4.5) on an external USB2.0 60 gig disk. I get measurably better response than when I had everything on the single internal disk that way (the OS uses the internal disk, I use the external disk).

But, I have backups on both (I could lose my laptop and borrow someone elses or I could lose my external disk and still be able to have the seminar - failover and disaster recovery :)

Oracle on RH Linux AS4

Deepak, September 14, 2005 - 11:51 pm UTC

Hi Tom,

I installed Oracle 10g R1 on my Linux (Redhat) AS4 box. I know Oracle does not certify the O/S for 10g but still got to install the Database. The installation completed successfully. But when I started dbca it is giving the exception.

UnsatisfiedLinkError exception loading native library: njni10


Please help in resolving the problem. Also please do let em know whether Oracle 10g has any command line installation option, i.e., no GUI/OUI. If yes please point me to some good docs.


Tom Kyte
September 15, 2005 - 7:43 am UTC

10gR1 is supported on that platform

I have 10gr1 and 9ir2 as well as 10gr2 on RH AS4. All three are certified.

does your dbca script "look" right (environment is burned into that)

what does ls -l $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libnjni10* return?

Oracle Appliance

A reader, September 15, 2005 - 11:18 am UTC

What ever happened to the Oracle Appliance Database. Wouldn't it be nice to have a version of Oracle that you can install on cheap x86 hardware without requiring an OS. Maybe some bare form of Linix that is totally supported by Oracle, patches and all.

Your thoughts...


Tom Kyte
September 15, 2005 - 12:25 pm UTC

People did not seem to accept "no touching the inside of the box".

The Oracle Appliance was a hardware+software database in a box - I thought it was an excellent idea, but it didn't sell. A database appliance it was, but not enough dials and knobs exposed to make people happy.

Maybe the time will come.

Linux Problem

Deepak, September 16, 2005 - 7:37 am UTC

Hi Tom,
following is the result of

ls -l $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libnjni10*

lrwxrwxrwx 1 oracle oinstall 47 Sep 14 09:04 /opt/oracle/product/ora10_1/lib/libnjni10 -> /opt/oracle/product/ora10_1/lib/libnjni10.dylib
-rw-rw-r-- 1 oracle oinstall 121314 Aug 28 2004 /opt/oracle/product/ora10_1/lib/libnjni10.so

I could not find any docs on Oracle site telling how to install on RH Linux AS4. Could you please point me to one if you know.

Tom Kyte
September 16, 2005 - 8:37 am UTC

Story behind Linux Admin book

Jack Wells, September 18, 2005 - 1:56 pm UTC

Tom,
You mentioned a good book in this thread (and others) called "Oracle Database 10g Linux Administration" by Wim Coekaerts ("the Linux Guy"). Do you have it? I've been trying to purchase it for about a year now and Amazon still has it flagged as "not yet released". I also noticed Amazon now says the book is by Edward Whalen!

What's up with this book? Do you know any of the skinny behind the scenes? I know you've had your share of hassles with book publishers... is it their fault? Has Wim just gotten fed up with them? I really wanted to get a publication by him...

Thanks,
Jack


Tom Kyte
September 18, 2005 - 2:54 pm UTC

I don't know the full story (or even bits and pieces).

I do know who he was working with - and I've worked with the same and they were awesome.


Book finally released!

Jack Wells, October 11, 2005 - 11:52 am UTC

FYI, I just received the "10g Linux Administration" book from Oracle Press and, indeed, it is now authored by Edward Whalen. Contributing authors are Robert B. Thomas, Fraser Talbot, and Dan Hotka. I wonder what ever happened with Wim Coekaerts...

Amazon still has it listed as "not yet released" but I expect this will be updated shortly (I got mine directly from McGraw-Hill's website).

Haven't had a chance to review it yet, but it looks very promising! If you ever get the book, I would enjoy hearing your comments (since you're a Linuxphile, too).

Jack



opensource oracle

Praveen Sehgal, October 31, 2005 - 8:38 am UTC

Tom see my post dated September 10 2004 above regarding oracle going opensource, I guess I was right afterall....
</code> http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5920796.html <code>


Tom Kyte
November 01, 2005 - 3:27 am UTC

how is that opensource???!??

Me thinks there is much confusion as to what opensource means - opensource is not free, opensource doesn't even really have anything to do with pricing - opensource is a development methodology more than anything.

I don't know why people equate "free with opensource" and "opensource with free", neither implies the other.

Adobe reader is free, it is not opensource.
Redhat Linux AS is opensource, it is not free.

OracleXE is not opensource

Jack Wells, November 15, 2005 - 12:03 pm UTC

and OracleXE is *not* opensource and *is* free...

CBO and SGA on hugmem boxes.

karmit, December 01, 2005 - 6:04 am UTC

Hi Tom,
We have a RHEL 3.x AS box running Oracle 10g Ent. Ed.
The hugmem thing was enabled which allowed us to increase
the SGA to a max of ~2.7GB.

If I do show sga, it shows 5GB, which is the SGA_MAX_SIZE setting and the size of the Buffer cache etc is not
reported properly due to this hugemem stuff.

Reason being, the sizes in the Oracle data dictionary for these memory structures are not the "real" ones actually being used.

My question is - Is it possible that the CBO gets confused
and works on "wrong data" while looking at the sizes of various structures from the data dictionary in this case?

Is there a simple way to prove/disprove/check this?

Thanks,
Karmit

Tom Kyte
December 01, 2005 - 12:40 pm UTC

things like the pga aggregate target, the *_size parameter if you are using them would affect the optimizer.

I am not personnaly aware of any issues. you can run a 10053 trace to see the list of parameters used by the CBO.

Mike Schmidt, December 03, 2005 - 11:57 pm UTC

> I've a p4 extreme edition (hyperthreaded) with 2
> gig of ram and an 80 gig internal disk.
>
> I've put all of my vm's (vmware 4.5) on an external
> USB2.0 60 gig disk

Tom: I noticed you had an HP laptop at the Dec 1st STLOUG presentation. Looked like a ZD8000. Has your HP laptop worked out well and played well with VMWare? I wish to purchase a similar high-end laptop for work and to learn about 10g RAC using the CDs Oracle is distributing with VMWare and 10g RAC. Plus, I can see many benefits to obtaining VMWare Workstation for virtualizing development Windows nodes and various Unix variants all on the same laptop.

I realize you are not in the business of rating laptop vendors but your opinion matters and any info you can share on your choice of laptop gear for Oracle development with VMWare would be very helpful to me and I suspect others. Thanks for elaborating more if you can. -Mike

Tom Kyte
December 04, 2005 - 6:28 am UTC

It is a zd7000 - got it before the zd8000 was released.

You could definitely get away with a smaller machine, this laptop (really should call it a notebook, the two fans on the bottom make it ill-advised for heavy duty laptop work) weighs alot (about 10 lbs with plug and all). It is rather large. But it is my desktop machine - my primary computer (I have various servers sitting around, but this is the machine I "work" on).

You might be better served with a pentium-M, 2 gig of ram and plenty of hard disk. the external drive works rather well with vmware as it lets the OS have one disk and vmware have it's own. that provided a noticiable speed up in performance for me.

The memory is the most important bit.

What I have my eye on for next time I buy one:

o dual core pentium m when they come out
o two batteries
o two 100 gb 7200 rpm sata drives with raid 0

I could get it almost from alienware now (it would not be the p-m chip but an AMD). Waiting to see if they have a p-m when it comes out. I've heard pretty good things about alienware from friends that have them. same big screen and all. With the two internal drives, I'd be able to lose the external disks and with two batteries, I might be able to use it every now and then without a plug (battery life on the zd* series is a little lacking, maybe an hour to hour and a half)



The zd7000 has been flawless for what I got it for so far. Sometimes I wish it was smaller (lighter) but that is what backpacks are for.



Very Helpful

Mike Schmidt, December 04, 2005 - 11:14 am UTC

Thanks Tom. Anytime you share info on the tools you use I find it helpful and you give me new ideas. Particularly so in this case given I'm in the market for new laptop and VMWare Workstation. Thanks for your reply.

Missing link to a VmWare Linux tutorial

A reader, December 14, 2005 - 9:49 pm UTC

I'm pretty sure that in this thread there was this guy who publish a link to a site where he, with great detail, explain how to install WmWare on Windows and then install Linux over it.
Do you, by any chance, remember the place of this link? I'm unable to find it and I'm pretty sure it was around here.
Sorry to bother with this, hope you can help me out.
Best regards.-

Tom Kyte
December 15, 2005 - 10:19 am UTC

Don't remember that, but the steps are rather "simple"?

o get vmware - it is an installshield, just click on it.
o have the linux cd in the cdrom player, start vmware and create a new vm, it'll boot from the cd and install.

it really is that easy. I just did 3 OS installs the other morning while answering emails...

VMWare / 10g RAC Links

Mike, December 14, 2005 - 10:16 pm UTC

The links I've bookmarked for further review are:

</code> http://dizwell.com/oracle/articles/rac10gwin.htm

And a three-part series at www.dbasupport.com:

http://www.dbasupport.com/oracle/ora10g/RACingAhead0101.shtml <code>

I've not reviewed yet so can't vouch for the quality of the content at these links.

Tom Kyte
December 15, 2005 - 10:20 am UTC

ahh, now that would be different - that isn't installing vmware and linux in as much as "configuring a cluster"

You can just download the datacenter edition from otn if you like as well, all pre-built (i use them myself)

Thanks

A reader, December 15, 2005 - 12:13 pm UTC

Tom and Mike,
thanks for the follow up.

Last question, are there anyone out there who installed Oracle 10g on CentOS 4.2? Any experience to share?

Best regards.

Help

A reader, January 08, 2006 - 10:25 am UTC

Hi Tom,
How to get the nth line of a file along with that line
in Unix??

I think we can use NR of awk utility but I don't know how to use
that.

$ cat a.c | awk 'NR =1'

cAN THIS WORK??



Tom Kyte
January 08, 2006 - 11:48 am UTC

$ head -10 file | tail -1

gets the 10th line of the file "file"




to reader (Help)

Marcio Portes, January 08, 2006 - 8:02 pm UTC

Tom, PMFJI.
To Reader

> How to get the nth line of a file along with that line
> in Unix??

Another way could be

[marcio@luke ~]$ cat file
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
[marcio@luke ~]$ cat -n file | sed -n '10p'
10 ten
[marcio@luke ~]$ cat -n file | sed -n '8,10p'
8 eight
9 nine
10 ten

Regards,

Tom Kyte
January 09, 2006 - 7:57 am UTC

pmfji - Pardon me for jumping in

had to go look that up.

htgltuaw

A reader, January 09, 2006 - 8:12 am UTC

had to go look that up as well

Sorry by PMFJI

Marcio Portes, January 09, 2006 - 8:24 am UTC

Tom, sorry by using such IM/usenet acronym. Try to avoid them all.
regards,

Installing Multiple Copies of Software

Jay, February 14, 2006 - 11:54 am UTC

Tom,

If we install one copy of an Oracle version, say 10g release 2 on our machine, then when we start several and different instanaces on it, the OS actually loads only one copy of the database binaries into memory which is shared by different instances, right?

Now suppose we want to separate the applications, and each application group is responsible for their own installation and configuration of Oracle binaries. Now we may have 3 copies of 10g release 2 on a same machine under different Oracle Home and owned by 3 different os users. So when all 3 application groups start their own Oracle instances, will OS actually load three copies of Oracle binaries, resulting in a big waste of memory?

Thanks!

Tom Kyte
February 14, 2006 - 1:25 pm UTC

depends on the OS and how much of the text is shared, but in general, yes the code is shareable.



If you ask me, the MAXIMUM NUMBER OF INSTANCES on a server is precisely:

one


not two, not three, just

one


the big wasting of memory happens regardless of whether you use the same binaries or not - the oracle binaries - that'll be noise in comparsion to the repeated SGA and other memory structures.

Don't forget to see the forest, for all of the trees...

Re: Installing Multiple Copies of Oracle

Jay, February 15, 2006 - 9:40 am UTC

Tom,

Thanks for your reply. But can you give more detail when you say the maximum number of instances on a server is just one? Are you talking about the actual oracle binaries in memory when several databases are running? And is this even true for installations in different Oracle Home?

can I safely say the oracle binaries size is about the size of the "oracle" file in $ORACLE_HOME/bin?

Thanks

Tom Kyte
February 15, 2006 - 9:45 am UTC

For a production server, the maximum number of instances (eg: if you did a ps -aef on unix and grepped out pmon - there would be ONE) is one.


There would be no more than one database instance running on the server.

Re: Multiple Copies of Installation

Jay, February 16, 2006 - 3:09 pm UTC

"is one" or "should be one"?

It's not an uncommon practice for companies to buy large machines with a bunch of CPUs and lots of memories and then run multiple oracle instances/pmons on these servers for different applications, even for production environments. And I don't think this practice really degrades performances.


Tom Kyte
February 17, 2006 - 1:24 pm UTC

This practice certainly and obviously affects performance.

You have N lgwrs
You have N copyies of the SGA with lots of repeated junk.
You have N dbwrs
You have N of everything.


the maximum number of instances on a server is one. You can read that as "should be one" if you like, but I say it as "is one".

Can you run more than one? Sure.
Should you? Surely not.



got lots of cpu's? domain the machine into smaller machines, wall off the instances from one another, have separate file sytems for each (physically).



Performance of external hard drive

A reader, September 02, 2006 - 6:06 pm UTC

You have mentioned in your earlier posts that you are using USB external drive to hold your database. I have a question.

I need to add more space to my windows xp desktop to build a test Oracle 9r2 oracle server. This is a datawarehouse database. I am planning to run single user tests only, my refresh will read millions of records from same instance (application schema) and create a warehouse by writing the data in DW schema.

I have an available slot so I can add an internal or external hard disk. I am planning to store the Oracle installation on primary disk and keep the data files on this external/internal disk. The advantage with external hard disk is that I can run the instance from any other server (but I can live without this if it kills my performance a lot)


What do you prefer between internal Hard drive (ata/100) vs USB 2.0 external drive? Is the external drive going to have lot of performance degradation?

Tom Kyte
September 02, 2006 - 6:22 pm UTC

to hold my VM's (virtual machines!!) - a virtual machine IMAGE, the database happens to live in there, but as far as the OS is concerned it is local IDE or SCSI drives - not a USB drive....


That usb drive will be a problem under windows... The database won't "see it", since it is removable media and the SERVICE the database is running under won't have visibility to it easily.



two versions on same machine with same user?

Zahid, September 27, 2006 - 7:24 am UTC

I have installed 9.2.0.4.0 on linux 2.4.9-e and I want to install 9.2.0.1.0 on the same server and with the same user but I am getting error like

The Java RunTime Environment was not found at E/bin/java. Hence, the Oracle Universal Installer cannot be run.
Please visit </code> http://www.javasoft.com <code>and install JRE version 1.3.1 or higher and try again.

I am using 2 different ORACLE_HOME. Is it something to do with the earliest version first and the later version second. As i have installed the later first and now trying to install the earliest and the JRE is being conflicted.

Please advice me some.
Thanx in advance.

Tom Kyte
September 27, 2006 - 3:00 pm UTC

please utilize support (which you must have, you have the 9204 patchset) for configuration help - I haven't personally hit this myself.

Total databases on Linux

Devendra, November 01, 2006 - 8:18 am UTC

Dear Tom,
I am new to linux.
How do i come to know how many databases(running as well as non running) are there on linux machine.
For running DB : ps -ef | grep 'ora_' will use if i am not wrong.
But for non running DB what to do.
should i search Whole machine for all init*.ora file.
or there is some other way.

Thanks in advance

Tom Kyte
November 01, 2006 - 8:54 am UTC

since there is nothing saying that an instance has to be registered anywhere (eg: I can create a database without updating any oratab's or anything, I can name my parameter file whatever I want), you would have to ask your DBA's at your site what YOUR conventions are.

Likely, the oratab is all you need in most cases, it would list all of the available instances and is generally maintained (but does not HAVE to be maintained)

Else, you would have to search the entire file system looking for init files, which would be a waste.

installing

Dawar, November 01, 2006 - 6:35 pm UTC

Tom,

I am installing Oracle DB 10.2 on Unix.
At configuration Assistants windows.

Oracle Net Cofiguration Assistan is succeeded
Completion Database creating is pending

copying database file is done
creating and starting oracle instance is done
completing database creation is 85 % from three hours.

OS prerequisites were passed earlier.

Regards,
Dawar

Tom Kyte
November 01, 2006 - 6:41 pm UTC

please utilize support for installation and configuration issues, this isn't support.

Done

Dawar Naqvi, November 03, 2006 - 2:41 pm UTC

Tom,

It was network issue with DNS server.

Install is done.
I installed DB successfully, only I need to create dbconsole.
Creation of dbconsole was not successful.

Probably this was due to domain name.

Just sharing my experience with others folks to let them know if noting wrong with your site please check other possibility such as network/firewall/DMZ/DNS server/Security etc
.

Dawar

crossover

A reader, November 04, 2006 - 5:54 pm UTC

Hi Tom
do you still use this soft to run microsoft office apps in the linux environment on your laptop?


Tom Kyte
November 05, 2006 - 9:07 am UTC

no, I run windows on the laptop to run linux in vmware now.

Please help

Sudhir, December 11, 2006 - 4:19 am UTC

Hi Tom,
I work under AIX environment.
I have a sales data file(salesdat.csv) which contains the sales details of different products datewise.
This file has date values on the 7th field.
I would like to get the distinct date values after doing a sort on that field.
If you have time, Could you please let me know how to do that?
Thanks.

Tom Kyte
December 11, 2006 - 8:06 am UTC

you write SQL?


and you would

a) get distinct values
b) then sort

not the other way around.

OK

Sudhir, December 11, 2006 - 11:59 pm UTC

Hi Tom,
Is it not possible through direct Unix command like the raw imperfect one below?

$cat salesdat.csv|sort +7 | uniq ...|head -10

I am not sure whether Uniq command applies to column level
details.
your help would be appreciated.
Thanks

Tom Kyte
December 12, 2006 - 6:56 am UTC

why are you asking shell programming questions on a database website?

OK

A reader, December 12, 2006 - 7:50 am UTC

Hi,
I tried in some Unix forums but not able to get the answer.
So I tried here.

Tom Kyte
December 12, 2006 - 8:31 am UTC

unique looks at the entire "line" of text -

$ man uniq

UNIQ(1) User Commands UNIQ(1)

NAME
uniq - remove duplicate lines from a sorted file


To Sudhir

A reader, December 12, 2006 - 9:17 am UTC

Try:

$
$ cat dates.csv
1 1 11/11/2006
1 2 11/11/2006
1 3 01/12/2005
1 4 04/03/2004
1 5 11/12/2006
$
$ awk '{ print $3 }' dates.csv | sort -t '/' -k3 -k2 -k1 | uniq -c
1 04/03/2004
1 01/12/2005
2 11/11/2006
1 11/12/2006
$

Assuming: dates are DD/MM/YYYY

RED HAT LINUX version ??

Oracle Khan, December 24, 2006 - 6:29 pm UTC

HI Tom

When I am trying to install Oracle 10g rel 1 on Red Hat Linux 4 x86(32 Bit), I am getting this error

Starting Oracle Universal Installer...

Checking installer requirements...

Checking operating system version: must be redhat-2.1, redhat-3, SuSE-9, SuSE-8 or UnitedLinux-1.0
Failed <<<<

I am not sure how to verify the version og Lnux I have installed on the server.

When I ran uname -a I get

Linux db2005a 2.6.9-42.ELsmp #1 SMP Wed Jul 12 23:27:17 EDT 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

How can be sure that this is Linux 4 and not Linux 2.6 ...

and also was wondering whats the difference between Advance Server and Enterprise Linux.

Thanks

Khan
Tom Kyte
December 25, 2006 - 7:08 am UTC

did you see the list of supported versions for 10g RELEASE ONE (don't use that, use release 2)

redhat-4 is specically - not listed.

the 2.6.9-42 you see is the kernel version - not the redhat release number.

Did not get you

Oracle Khan, December 25, 2006 - 11:29 am UTC

Did u mean that we should use Oracle 10g Release 2 on Linux 4 instead of Oracle 10g Release 1 ????

Also did not get the difference between Redhat EL and AS.

Thanks

Khan
Tom Kyte
December 25, 2006 - 1:36 pm UTC

you should know, you installed it (the OS)

"U" isn't here, cannot locate them - if you know where "U" is - let me know...


You should be using 10gR2 - yes, and it supports the version of the OS you have installed.

To: Kahn

Tom Fox, December 26, 2006 - 7:59 am UTC

To see the Red Hat version, do:

cat /etc/redhat-release

Also, EL stands for Enterprise Linux, so RHEL = Red Hat Enterprise Linux. WS/ES/AS are different platforms supplied by Red Hat. WS = Workstation, ES = Enterprise Server, AS = Advanced Server. There are many differences between ES and AS :

http://www.redhat.com/rhel/details/servers/

WS is a client platform, so I wouldn't use it on servers if you need to comply with Oracle's support structure. I would personally try it on my own test box, but not a system that others would need to use as well.

Database not starting up when server reboots

Oracle Khan, December 26, 2006 - 4:33 pm UTC

I have a Red Hat Linux Server RHEL4(32 Bit)
and I have installed Oracle 10g Release 1(10.1.0.4).
I have 6 instances running on it.
When I reboot the server the databases are not bouncing back automatically despite the fact that I have updated my /etc/oratab file with "Y" flag for all databases.
Am I missing anything ??
Thanks

Tom Kyte
December 26, 2006 - 9:17 pm UTC

probably that you do not run "dbstart" upon startup?

Database not starting up when server reboots

Khan, January 03, 2007 - 11:59 am UTC

If I have "Y" flag set in oratab file and I am not running "dbstart" script, does it make any difference ??
where and how I can get dbstart script and how can I make sure when server (Linux) restarts it runs dbstart file ??

Thanks

Tom Kyte
January 05, 2007 - 8:23 am UTC

if you are not running dbstart, and you are using the oratab file, how do you THINK it would autostart??


ctl-f for orastart on this page, that is my preferred approach, if you want to use dbstart, you would schedule it in the same fashion.

it just "comes with"


$ which dbstart
/home/ora9ir2/bin/dbstart



leomoyo, March 09, 2007 - 1:59 am UTC

Hi Tom,

Your advice on automatic startup/shutdown of database on boot/shutdown was spot on. I'm not using dbora and /etc/oratab.
Thanks for the advice!

OK

Kumar, June 05, 2007 - 1:16 am UTC

Hi Tom,
We use AIX version 3.1.
We have a date field in a csv file in the format of YYYYMMDD.
We would like to change it as DDMMYYYY and thought of using "sed" utility
to achieve this in the following way.

$ sed -e 's/20070301/01032007/g' -e 's/20070302/02032007/g' -e .. -e .. marchdat.csv > tempdat.csv

But we would like to eliminate the hard coding of date values and use a generic approach as

$ sed 's/yyyymmdd/ddmmyyyyy/g' marchdat.csv > tempdat.csv

Is there any way to achieve this?
Tom Kyte
June 06, 2007 - 12:50 pm UTC

load it into a database table and I'll be glad to help you out.


database connected to idle instance whenever i restart my machine.

vishal Shah, October 04, 2007 - 2:06 am UTC

hi,
i have installed oracle 9i in windows XP.the installation is been completed successfully & also i have created instance manully,have taken cold backup of the database from another machine.now every time i have to start the database whenever i restart the machine.i have checked all the posiible way to sort this out,but unable to it.Can u tell me what need to be done in this case.

fyi...services are running automatically

OK

A reader, October 10, 2007 - 6:16 am UTC

Hi Tom,
In Unix I tried to remove the characters from a file having an extension with a .[exe or .txt or .jpg] using below
sed command.But it's not working.How to make it work?

$> cat >> test.txt
orange orange.txt apple.txt
foo foo.bar foobar.exe
count count.gif count.jpg
^C$>

$> cat test.txt | sed 's/[a-z][A-Z].[a-z][A-Z]//g'
orange orange.txt apple.txt
foo foo.bar foobar.exe
count count.gif count.jpg
$>

database connected to idle instance whenever i restart my machine

Guillaume, November 06, 2007 - 10:44 am UTC

Vishal,

Did you check the value of ORA_<SID>_AUTOSTART in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\HOMEx of your registry?

HTH,
Regards.
Guillaume

as4 squid configuration

kayoum, March 27, 2008 - 8:49 am UTC

dear sir
i like to use linux as4 server for my small business but i never done with this server. please i need ur help. i hope u will help me out.i installed in my computer but i dont know the configre any more.please help me i also like setup with dns and gateway server with asign mac address . but ineed ur more more more help. pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Tom Kyte
March 27, 2008 - 10:48 am UTC

step one:

locate this "U" person, you are desperate for their help.

I don't (truthfully) know what to say beyond that. You cannot seriously expect someone sitting on the other end of the internet to tell you the next step after installing red hat AS4 - how to configure YOUR machine, on YOUR hardware?

Short of reading the installation guide shipped with the Oracle software, which actually tells you all of the configuration necessary - I guess "start there"

It is all on otn.oracle.com under documentation

http://www.dizwell.com/ went out

Alvaro Varela De Marco, March 30, 2008 - 10:28 pm UTC

Tom,
I would like to tell you that http://www.dizwell.com/ is down. It's an important lost for all of us because it was a great site.

Since your have the reference at your Links page, I ask your for some comments about this site. In the other hand, if you have some information about dizwell continuity on other site, please tell us where can we find it.

Thank you

Increasing Listener log file size.

Malay Singh, April 11, 2008 - 1:54 am UTC

Hi,
I am system Oracle DBA.In our production database (on Linux server) listener log file has been exceeded to 3GB and there is there is very less space for this location.As this is production database we cannot do any any step directly.So I am asking that if we remove that listener log,then can Oracle create listener log automatically or not?Please reply as soon as possible because any time server may hang and database may crash.
Tom Kyte
April 11, 2008 - 7:53 am UTC

one approach:

lsnrctl
set log_file listener.new.log


that'll start a new logfile for you and you can then archive the old one

CenOS

Rishkan, July 13, 2008 - 12:07 am UTC

Hi,
I try to install CentOS to my DualCore computer, there CPU not supported error message coming.
Any person have soultaion please send it .

AIX Command to get Physical Memory used by Oracle

Raja, September 10, 2008 - 11:16 am UTC

Hi Tom,

I am trying out to get the physical memory used by Oracle in a AIX system. I have some set of commands such as "topas" and "ps" with some option but is not getting out the proper command to get it out.

Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks

Linux oracle binaries copy

reader, September 10, 2008 - 2:10 pm UTC

Hey Tom:

I have a machine with Linux on it. and I also install Oracle database server on it. Now I want to set up another Linux machine with the same version of Oracle on it. Can I just copy the $ORACLE_HOME or /oracle.

Our production environment is Unix, I know binaries copy on Unix works. But not sure about the Linux.

Thank you!
Tom Kyte
September 11, 2008 - 11:18 am UTC

I would not recommend this, you can use enterprise manager to clone OR you can install - you won't have the files that go outside of the Oracle home, you won't have the proper setup.

How about Fedora

Yawei Zhang, September 14, 2008 - 10:03 pm UTC

Hi,

Is it Ok to learn Oracle + Linux with Fedora, but I see it is not supported for Oracle on Fedora.
?

Thanks.
Tom Kyte
September 16, 2008 - 9:57 pm UTC

if you can get it running, go for it. to play with.

How about Fedora

Frank van Bortel, September 15, 2008 - 4:36 am UTC

As Fedora is "state-of-the-art" with new releases about every six months, you are in for some (a lot) of compatibility problems. Good if you really want to learn Linux.
Not so good if you want to learn some Linux and learn Oracle on Linux.
Good if you use a similar, state-of-the-art laptop: Fedora will probably support the latest and the greatest hardware. But so will a lot of other distributions; Ubuntu is getting a fair amount of exposure these days, and it works for 10G Rel 2 (I can tell from experience) and 11G (I heard)

For all other: stick to CentOS (which is the source code of RedHat, with all references to RedHat stripped out, recompiled). Oracle will install without too much problems, and you are on a supported combo. It will not run on the latest hardware; it is meant as stable server software, and is not following every niche.

A nice learning experience for all: try to compile your own kernel. See what that brings in terms of speed and stability!

Try gentoo

Den, October 04, 2008 - 6:40 am UTC

If someone is looking for a 'Linux immersion' experience I'd definitely recommend installing Gentoo Linux. It takes a while to install (it is source based, meaning the programs that you choose to install are compiled on your machine). It's a great way for someone new to Linux to see how the OS is built.

Also, while gentoo is not supported by Oracle, there is extensive online documentation on how to install Oracle on Gentoo. I've been using it as my development machine for years (along with fluxbox as my window manager - very lightweight and fast).
Gentoo has a really nice philosophy that you don't see from the commercial Linux distributions - only install what the user explicitly asks for. When you have a newly installed system, there are very few applications installed (only those required for the functioning of the O/S). However, installing applications is a breeze - just 'emerge <app name>' and you're done.

A reader, July 28, 2011 - 10:14 am UTC

Tom:

If you are migrating an oracle 9i DBMS server and pl/sql applications and oracle hTTP server from large IBM AIX machine to a DELL poweredge R710 server, would you pick Red Hat Linux or Windows for the OS and why?

let us say your development experience has been with UNIX only but now you have to do DBA functions too.

I always though oracle runs better on unix. but couple of articles here see to say different things.

I am not sure about the accuracy of this article where they say oracle on windows is easier

http://www.dbametrix.com/ora-unix-linux-win.html

And this study says oracle runs better on linux

http://assets1.csc.com/lef/downloads/Windows_Linux_OracleDP.pdf


Tom Kyte
July 28, 2011 - 7:32 pm UTC

I wouldn't pick either, I'd pick OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux) - but only because the choice of an OS is more based on what you know, what you have access to, what you are most comfortable with.


You can be successful on windows, you can fail miserably on windows.

Ditto for <any flavor of> Linux.


Oracle can be made to run dandy on windows - if you know windows.


Studies are made to show/prove the points of the person funding the study many times :)



What do you have more experience with in your shop? Administering and tuning windows or Linux (which is a bit like unix but not entirely the same thing)

windows

sam, August 09, 2011 - 7:34 am UTC

Tom:

They claim they can support both environments using vmware.
I think they are more of a windows shop though.

<<because the choice of an OS is more based on what you know, what you have access to, what you are most comfortable with. >>

But, you do no think technically speaking that because windows was not designed from the ground up to be multitasking system as UNIX it has some disadvantages.
With Unix you have one unix process per oracle process while windows everything is a thread under one windows process.

This is why I think when one application runnning on windows server gets hosed they restart the machine and kill all other applications with it.

One book mentions tha Virtualization evolved due to windows crashes because data centers wanted to run each application on its won windows server without buying a new hardware.





Tom Kyte
August 13, 2011 - 4:02 pm UTC

windows is definitely multitasking.

windows is NOT multi-user.


virtualization predates windows, predates unix, predates probably every OS you ever used.

It was invented for mainframes - it provides a hyper-stable environment from which to run, complete isolation, partitioning of resources.

It is a 1970's technology - and I personally am very happy to see it return.

Whoever wrote the book you read is probably under 35 ;) They didn't see virtualization "version 1.0", we called them LPARs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_partition_(virtual_computing_platform )

linux OS

kunal parsewar, August 15, 2011 - 2:46 am UTC

Hello Tom sir,
You are doing best job by guiding people for oracle.
i am a post graduate student of M.sc(soft.Engg).i have interest in oracle administration ,

i can easily perform administration on windows platform but i found many problems while working on linux.I know the basics of linux.

i mean to say would it be better for me to have an hands on experience on linux?

which platform most of the companies prefers?


Tom Kyte
August 15, 2011 - 8:22 pm UTC

"it depends", it totally depends.

Most companies use both.

Would it make sense to have varied experience - sure, there would be nothing wrong with you giving Linux a go around for a while if you have the opportunity.

Is it mandatory? Probably not.

virtualization

sam, August 15, 2011 - 8:31 am UTC

Tom:

Ok, but since windows is not MULTI USER does not that give Linux a big edge since oracle is MULTI USER server database?

It seems Virtualization is NEW for server machines (not mainframes). It existed for mainframes in the old times but I never heard of it deployed for mid-size servers until a few years back. If it is old stuff, VMare would not become such a hot company everyone runs after.
Tom Kyte
August 15, 2011 - 8:27 pm UTC

Ok, but since windows is not MULTI USER does not that give Linux a big edge
since oracle is MULTI USER server database?


No sam, it does not, not at all.

If you ask me = there would be NO ONE logged into my database server.

Sam, what do you think a mainframe is if it is not a SERVER? (have you ever seen a single user desktop mainframe running a spreadsheet??????)

The mid-sized servers of today are many many orders of magnitude more powerful than the mainframes of yesterday - heck your cell phone probably is.


You are confusing cause and effect here. VMWare makes a commercially viable product that people enjoy and appreciate. That product they make has a history that is older than you.

heck, the database you work on is probably older than you. Oracle makes "stuff that goes way back (to 1979)", but we are a fairly successful company.

What the heck does "age" have to do with "success" in todays market?


virtualiazation is older than the rdbms, the rdbms is probably older than you - and many companies are successful making both. Your logic escapes me here entirely.


kernel version upgradation

A reader, August 25, 2011 - 1:55 am UTC

Dear Tom,

There is a requirement of kernel upgradation in one of our system nodes to fix a bug. Currently our 10g database is running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.5 OS of kernel version 2.6.18-194.el5 which would be upgraded to kernel version 2.6.18-274.el5 . Therefore please suggest me if there would be any affect on the database due to that or any type of change required on our database pre or post kernel upgradation.
Tom Kyte
August 30, 2011 - 4:04 pm UTC

this is an obvious support question, please use my oracle support for things like this.

Solaris to Linux

A reader, February 28, 2012 - 10:18 am UTC

Hi Tom - Currently we have a database running on Oracle 10.2.0.4 on Solaris 10. We are planning to upgrade the Oracle database from 10.2.0.4 to Oracle 11.2.0.3 and move from Solaris 10 to Oracle Enterprise Linux 5. Is there a recommended architecture / file system layout with this combination ? We are not considering RAC, would you suggest using Oracle ASM / Oracle Restart. How can we determine if we need to go with Oracle ASM or not ?
Tom Kyte
February 28, 2012 - 10:46 am UTC

If you are single instance, not going to RAC and happy with file systems, that is probably all you need.

A reader, February 28, 2012 - 10:48 am UTC

So there is no need to go with ASM ?
Tom Kyte
February 28, 2012 - 10:55 am UTC

again


If you are single instance, not going to RAC and happy with file systems, that is probably all you need.

A reader, April 03, 2012 - 1:10 pm UTC

We are migrating our oracle database servers from Solaris 10 to Oracle Enterprise Linux (and also from 10g to 11g). The database size is around 500GB. For this size, what would you recommend to use to migrate the data from the Solaris to the Linux platform ?
I read in an article that if we use transportable tablespaces, we should use something like a convert tablespace.. Does that apply for this platform migration ?
Tom Kyte
April 03, 2012 - 1:15 pm UTC

I'll assume Sparc and not x86 - so that rules out a full database transport.

Your likely approaches are

a) datapump, since it is a pretty small database, just 500gb - that would be more than feasible. Database to Database data pump (no intermediate files) in parallel.

b) cross platform tablespace transports + datapump. You'd need/want data pump to get your users, sequences, views, code, etc over and then use cross platform transports to get the data over

c) if uptime is crucial you would have something like goldengate to replicate Solaris to Linux and then switch your users over to Linux and shutdown the Solaris side.

(a) is pretty easy but incurs downtime
(b) is more complex but might take less downtime
(c) is the most complex but has little to zero downtime.

linux

A reader, June 18, 2012 - 5:21 pm UTC

Excellent!

RHEL verions

A reader, October 17, 2012 - 6:31 pm UTC

Tom:
Do you know what is the latest RHEL version supported for installing oracle 11gR2?

The linux is also a vistual machine running on VMware.

Someone tells me that oracle does not support oracle 11g on RHEL 6.0 but only RHEL 5.3 but I have some doubts about his statement.
Tom Kyte
October 18, 2012 - 8:20 am UTC

please utilize support for this type of question, thanks