I recently upgraded my Linux installation to the latest OpenSuSe 11.2 release and then decided to install also the free version of the Oracle database (Oracle-XE or Oracle Express)..
The installation of Oracle consists of the following main steps:
a) Download Oracle from the Oracle site
The site contains different download files for Windows and some versions of Linux. Since the package management in OpenSuSe Linux is based on rpm, I downloaded an rpm file.
b) Log in on your system as a root user
c) install the rpm file with the command
rpm -ivh oracle-xe-univ-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm
d) execute the initial configuration of the database by running the command:
/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure
The command will ask you to choose the HTTP port, the listener port, the Sys and System password and I suggest to keep the suggested default values (i.e HTTP port=8080 and listener port= 1521), The system will also ask if you want to start the database automatically at boot time (I choose the yes answer).
e) After the configuration the system automatically starts the Net Listener and the Oracle database 10G Express. It prints a completion message that the Installation completed successfully and then suggests to access the database Home page by entering on your browser the command
127.0.0.1:8080/apex
f) I did as instructed, but the command was refused because it could not be executed on the server. At the point I started panicking and I thought that I must have made some errors. I decided to uninstall Oracle by running the command
rpm -e oracle-xe-univ
Then I re-installed from scratch. Unfortunately the results were exactly the same.
g) Finally I wondered if the problem might be connected to the Web server. I decided to install Apache (not installed by default) and to to re-install Oracle again. This time everything worked perfectly.
I found on various Linux Forums that many people seem to have this problem and I suggest them to try an installation of Apache before installing Oracle.
Mario Pesce is a Computer consultant and Software developer who has worked in many European countries (especially UK, Germany and Italy). He is especially interested in IBM iSeries (AS/400) and Linux systems. He has also developed a few websites and blogs such ashttp://mariopesceuk.blogspot.com/ and http://websites.datamission.co.uk.
