I am using Red Hat 7 and trying to install Oracle. I am following all the instructions in the "Oracle for Linux Starter Kit" by oracle but the installation fails at 82%. Any ideas?

Do you get an error message?

Yes, each time the error was different. I went to Oracle site and found out that Oracle 8i can only be installed on Red Hat 6.2. There was also a work around the problem which does not seem to work all the time. I will give it a shot and if I succeed I will definetly post it here.
Thank you very much

Installing Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition on a 700MHz 128MB IBM laptop, kernel 2.2.16-22. Someone tell me the installation time below (svrmgrl is the oracle installer) isn't normal.
The program has been stuck for err ... nearly 14 hours on 'Creating database files' but I reckon it's fallen over and barfed on itself.

9:05pm up 19:18, 4 users, load average: 1.08, 1.02, 1.01
109 processes: 106 sleeping, 2 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 95.2% user, 0.5% system, 0.0% nice, 4.2% idle
Mem: 127824K av, 122128K used, 5696K free, 30588K shrd, 2752K buff
Swap: 264560K av, 18252K used, 246308K free 22604K cached

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
3723 oracle 18 0 6660 6660 1928 R 94.4 5.2 814:19 svrmgrl

etc ...

It really makes me mad when companies port software to Linux and don't bother to optimise it (especially after paying a lot for that book), and Oracle is a great example of this. Evidence - why is the minimum memory requirement for Windows Oracle 8i Server 64MB for the Linux version it's .. 128MB. Perhaps because instead of rewriting the system, Oracle have just hacked and kludged at it, cheered when they got to run and published it! Aaaagggghh!

"Can't break it. Can't break in."

- I broke it. Can I hold them liable for that slogan?

Bert

Make sure you exit out of X before creating the DB. Made a huge difference for me.

--jeremy

But the installer needs X to run the JVM. It's not command line driven.

Bert

At the end it will give you the option to create a script that will setup the database. Choose that option, then exit X and run the script.

--jeremy

Reading around, I hear that RedHat 7 and Oracle 8i are chalk and cheese. Good job I've got Redhat 6.2 still lying around.

I still put the blame squarely at the feet of Oracle for not making the bizarre requirements (such as outdated C libraries) not explicit. As Oracle is the king beast of databases I hope their porting efforts this summer are more co-ordinated.

I was given the option of saving it as a script, and I'll give that a try. That book might not tell me how to execute it from a shell so I'm gonna just hope it's a normal shell script.

Thanks

Bert