Installing Oracle 11gR2 Enterprise Edition on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

$ sudo apt-get install unzip build-essential x11-utils rpm ksh lsb-rpm libaio1

Ubuntu 10.04 comes with libstdc++6 installed. However, Oracle 11gR2 requires libstdc++5. If you do not install libstdc++5, you will see errors as described in this OTN thread. The fix, as described in that thread, is to download and manually shoehorn the libstdc++5 library files onto Ubuntu 10.04:

$ cd /usr/lib32 $ sudo ln -s libstdc++.so.5.0.7 libstdc++.so.5

Now we're ready to move on.

Create User and Groups

First create the oinstall and dba groups:

$ sudo su - # addgroup oinstall # addgroup dba

Then create the oracle user and assign it to those groups:

# chown -R oracle:dba /home/oracle

Now we create some symbolic links to give the Ubuntu system a more "Red Hat-ish layout," as Augusto put it:

# chown -R oracle:dba /u01

Then we update some sysctl parameters by editing /etc/sysctl.conf. It is wisest to backup this file first and then add these lines to the end of /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 9000 65535

Note that these values are different from what was needed in 11gR1.

Now we update some limits for the oracle software owner by adding these lines to the end of /etc/security/limits.conf:

oracle hard nofile 65535

Again, it is best to backup the file first.

Now we activate the new settings from /etc/sysctl.conf with this command:

# sysctl -p

You should see the new settings in the output of that command.

Unpack and Install the Software

From here we go into the directory containing our two 11gR2 database zip files. I'm using the 64-bit edition, so my files are named linux.x64_11gR2_databaseXof2.zip, where X is 1 or 2. I unzip both of these files, which creates a "database" subdirectory:

$ unzip linux.x64_11gR2_database_2of2.zip

Each of these commands will produce a large volume of output to the terminal as it lists each file being unpacked. Once this is done, your directory should look something like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 seiler seiler 1.1G 2010-03-09 12:38 linux.x64_11gR2_database_2of2.zip

Now you simply cd into the database directory and run the runInstaller program:

$ ./runInstaller

This will launch the Oracle Universal Installer, or OUI, program. The rest is pretty straight forward. Since this is just a sandbox, I chose not to provide any email info and declined to receive updates. I chose to first install the software only, which went perfectly well. OUI will complain about missing packages, since it is checking for RPMs. We can safely ignore these and proceed with installation.

Once installation is done I set these variables in my bash environment:

export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi

Then some quick tests to verify installation:

Everything looks hunky-dory. Let's create an instance.

I launched dbca to create an Oracle 11gR2 instance. The one problem I encountered here was that, at the end of dbca prompts, the "Confirmation" dialog window was blank. Other blog posts on the internet suggested blindly clicking around until you magically hit the "OK" button, but more often than not I would hit the "Cancel" button. Turns out this is a not-so-uncommon problem with Java Swing and Gnome's visual effects. The solution for Gnome users is to disable Visual Effects in the Appearance preferences before launching dbca. If you are using a lightweight desktop environment such as LXDE, you shouldn't have this problem.

And that's that. The rest is nothing new to those who have done installations before. You can optionally configure TNS names or Listener with the netca tool, or log into your new instance and enjoy.

Special thanks to Augusto Bott for not only authoring the previous Oracle-on-Ubuntu articles but also for suggesting the Gnome Visual Effects conflict!