The Penguin Meets The Oracle

I've not done a technical post for a looonnnnngggggg time.

It is high time that I write something geeky as I am a big geek after all. (^^)

Anyway, I've been dying to try my hand in installing Oracle on Linux. I always came close but due to some hardware limitation, I ran into a lot of problems. What to do when you're given a machine which only has the capability to run MySQL and you're asked to install Oracle??

Oh well, my torture weapons of choice today are as follows,

1. CentOS 5 - A open source version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5
2. VMWare Server 1.0 - My virtualization software so that I run this off my laptop
3. Oracle 9i (9.2.0.4) for Linux x86

I began life by creating a new virtual machine and installing CentOS. The Linux installation went pretty smooth but as usual, I had to customize a few services and software to be installed - development libraries which you always need as some software depends on it.

Anyway, do take note that unlike the Windows installation, Oracle requires that for *nix based systems, some pre-installation steps need to take place. Note: Although the steps were outlined for RHELAS3, the pre-install steps are pretty relevant. Do check out the Oracle Installation Guide for more information.

However, since I'm running CentOS 5, naturally, a few things need to be changed or else you'll run into some library issues.

1. Change the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL environment variable in the user oracle's profile to match the current version of your kernel by running the command "uname -a". Edit the oracle user's ".bash_profile" file.

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL = 2.6.18; export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL

2. Create a symbolic link for the libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 to your server's current version of libstdc++
ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.8 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2

3. Install the libXp library as this caused a lot of funny issues with my installer.
yum install libXp

NOTE: Ensure that you are "root" when executing the commands.

4. Create the libcwait.so file as follows
- Ensure that you are "oracle" user
- Ensure that gcc is installed by issuing the "locate" command.
- Create a file called "libcwait.c" in the home directory
- Enter the following content and save it.

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
pid_t
__libc_wait (int *status)
{
int res;
asm volatile ("pushl %%ebx\n\t"
   "movl %2, %%ebx\n\t"
   "movl %1, %%eax\n\t"
   "int $0x80\n\t"
   "popl %%ebx"
   : "=a" (res)
   : "i" (__NR_wait4), "0" (WAIT_ANY), "c" (status), "d" (0),
     "S" (0));
return res;
}

- create the environment variable LD_PRELOAD as follows at the commandline

export LD_PRELOAD=/home/oracle/libcwait.so

- compile the file as follows
gcc -o -shared $HOME/libcwait.so -O -g $HOME/libcwait.c

Once this is complete, you may run the Oracle Universal Installer from Disk1 of the installation directories.

All hail the penguin God... **Ohhhhmmmmmmmm**

P/S: Unfortunately, I ran out of diskspace in the virtual machine before I could even install the software. I've got to move some stuff around before I can start my Oracle install. Oh well.....

UPDATE: The LD_PRELOAD variable should be entered in the oracle user's profile.