Oracle 10gR2 on Ubuntu 6.10 AMD64

I just finished installing Oracle 10gR2 on my Intel Core2 Ubuntu 6.10 machine running in x86_64 (AMD64) mode. The installation is fairly straight forward with a few gotchas. In comparison to CentOS/Redhat, Ubuntu 6.10 has got much more native 64-bit libraries, pretty much everything is actually 64-bit. Under Redhat most libraries are 32-bit. And the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) uses a 32-bit Java runtime so hence we have to install a few i386 compatability libraries to get it working.

First of all make sure your machines hostname resolves to your external IP and not the loopback IP (127.0.0.1).
Double check using this command

$ grep $(hostname) /etc/hosts
192.168.95.40           htpc

If you see 127.0.0.1 just edit the hosts file to have the external IP.

Now you need to install a few compat libraries and 32-bit libraries.

sudo apt-get install gcc libaio1 lesstif2 
  lesstif2-dev make libc6 libstdc++5 \
  lib32stdc++6 lib32z1 ia32-libs

This will probably cascade in to quite a few packages depending on how much you have installed, be patient and let it download everything it needs. The extra ia32 libraries is probably the biggest change to the old 32-bit installation.

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf to have the kernel parameters required by Oracle (I've added a few extras here as well to avoid unecessery swapping).
Add these lines:

# Oracle stuff
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
fs.file-max = 65536
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000
net.core.rmem_default = 262144
net.core.rmem_max = 262144
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_max = 262144
vm.swappiness=10

Create the oracle user and required groups (you don't really need the nobody group, it's only used by root.sh to be the group owning the oraenv and dbhome scripts).

sudo groupadd nobody
sudo groupadd oinstall
sudo groupadd dba
sudo useradd -s /bin/bash -g oinstall -G dba oracle
sudo passwd oracle

Increase system limits by adding these lines to /etc/security/limits.conf:

* soft nproc 2047
* hard nproc 16384
* soft nofile 1024
* hard nofile 65536

To avoid the non-redhat warnings during the prereqs run this command:

echo 3 > /etc/redhat-release

Add a few symlinks to avoid any script problems:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/awk /bin/awk
sudo ln -s /bin/true /bin/rpm
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/basename /bin/basename
sudo ln -s /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /lib/libgcc_s.so
sudo mkdir -p /u01/oracle/10g
sudo chown -R oracle:oinstall /u01/oracle/10g
sudo chmod -R 775 /u01/oracle

Time to run the installer, make sure you are allowed to use the X11 server (export DISPLAY, xhost, vnc whatever).
To get the 32-bit JRE to work you need to set the XLOCALELIBDIR before running the installer:

export XLOCALELIBDIR=/usr/lib32/X11/locale
cd /your/install/dir
./runInstaller

I just ran the defaults straight through (except the SID name and password). The installation without any warnings or errors. The linker worked fine and everything was configure properly, dbca created the standard database.

oracle@htpc:~$ uname -a
Linux htpc 2.6.17-10-generic #2 SMP Fri Oct 13 15:34:39 UTC 2006 x86_64 GNU/Linux
oracle@htpc:~$ rsqlplus / as sysdba

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Sat Oct 21 20:13:45 2006

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options

SQL> select platform_name from v$database;

PLATFORM_NAME
--------------------
Linux 64-bit for AMD

SQL>

This guide is based on the Oracle 10gR2 x64_64 installation guide and I've also used Dizwells excellent Ubuntu 6.06 32-bit guide for some ubuntu specific notes. Thanks.

Cool, now I can alt-tab between sqlplus and my latest Prison Break episodes on the TV . :)