Oracle XE on Linux

Note

These tips have come from my installation of Oracle XE on my Dell SC430 running SuSE Linux Pro 9.3. Use of this information is at the risk of the user and I do not offer any warranty or guarantee of correctness.

Where to get it?

At the time of writing you can obtain Oracle XE for Linux and Windows from Oracles Web site

You can find some documentation at http://www.oracle.com/pls/xe102/homepage

Linux Prerequisites

To install Oracle XE on Linux you will need;

• An RPM based distribution
• glibc >= 2.3.2
• libaio >= 0.3.96

Note on Memory Requirements

The documentation says there is a minimum requirement of 256MB, this is enforced by the RPM installer on Linux, but you can install it on a machine with less memory by using the following RPM installation command;

rpm -ivh --nopre oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-0.1.i386.rpm

If you can get a machine with more RAM it's worth doing so, but if you can't this will allow you to make do until you can meet the recommended minimum spec.

Note for SuSE 9.3 Pro users

My SuSE Pro 9.3 installation didn't include libaio on the installation media, I had to download it for my x86 box from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.3/suse/i586/libaio-0.3.102-3.i586.rpm