10.6 Installing Oracle®

Contributed by Marcel Moolenaar.

10.6.1 Preface

This document describes the process of installing Oracle® 8.0.5 and Oracle 8.0.5.1 Enterprise Edition for Linux onto a FreeBSD machine.

10.6.2 Installing the Linux Environment

Make sure you have both emulators/linux_base and devel/linux_devtools from the Ports Collection installed. If you run into difficulties with these ports, you may have to use the packages or older versions available in the Ports Collection.

If you want to run the intelligent agent, you will also need to install the Red Hat Tcl package: tcl-8.0.3-20.i386.rpm. The general command for installing packages with the official RPM port (archivers/rpm) is:

# rpm -i --ignoreos --root /compat/linux --dbpath /var/lib/rpm package

Installation of the package should not generate any errors.

10.6.3 Creating the Oracle Environment

Before you can install Oracle, you need to set up a proper environment. This document only describes what to do specially to run Oracle for Linux on FreeBSD, not what has been described in the Oracle installation guide.

10.6.3.1 Kernel Tuning

As described in the Oracle installation guide, you need to set the maximum size of shared memory. Do not use SHMMAX under FreeBSD. SHMMAX is merely calculated out of SHMMAXPGS and PGSIZE. Therefore define SHMMAXPGS. All other options can be used as described in the guide. For example:

options SHMMAXPGS=10000
options SHMMNI=100
options SHMSEG=10
options SEMMNS=200
options SEMMNI=70
options SEMMSL=61

Set these options to suit your intended use of Oracle.

Also, make sure you have the following options in your kernel configuration file:

options SYSVSHM #SysV shared memory
options SYSVSEM #SysV semaphores
options SYSVMSG #SysV interprocess communication

10.6.3.2 Oracle Account

Create an oracle account just as you would create any other account. The oracle account is special only that you need to give it a Linux shell. Add /compat/linux/bin/bash to /etc/shells and set the shell for the oracle account to /compat/linux/bin/bash.

10.6.3.3 Environment

Besides the normal Oracle variables, such as ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID you must set the following environment variables:

Variable Value
LD_LIBRARY_PATH $ORACLE_HOME/lib
CLASSPATH $ORACLE_HOME/jdbc/lib/classes111.zip
PATH /compat/linux/bin /compat/linux/sbin /compat/linux/usr/bin /compat/linux/usr/sbin /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/local/bin $ORACLE_HOME/bin

It is advised to set all the environment variables in .profile. A complete example is:

ORACLE_BASE=/oracle; export ORACLE_BASE
ORACLE_HOME=/oracle; export ORACLE_HOME
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
ORACLE_SID=ORCL; export ORACLE_SID
ORACLE_TERM=386x; export ORACLE_TERM
CLASSPATH=$ORACLE_HOME/jdbc/lib/classes111.zip
export CLASSPATH
PATH=/compat/linux/bin:/compat/linux/sbin:/compat/linux/usr/bin
PATH=$PATH:/compat/linux/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
export PATH

10.6.4 Installing Oracle

Due to a slight inconsistency in the Linux emulator, you need to create a directory named .oracle in /var/tmp before you start the installer. Let it be owned by the oracle user. You should be able to install Oracle without any problems. If you have problems, check your Oracle distribution and/or configuration first! After you have installed Oracle, apply the patches described in the next two subsections.

A frequent problem is that the TCP protocol adapter is not installed right. As a consequence, you cannot start any TCP listeners. The following actions help solve this problem:

# cd $ORACLE_HOME/network/lib
# make -f ins_network.mk ntcontab.o
# cd $ORACLE_HOME/lib
# ar r libnetwork.a ntcontab.o
# cd $ORACLE_HOME/network/lib
# make -f ins_network.mk install

Do not forget to run root.sh again!

10.6.4.1 Patching root.sh

When installing Oracle, some actions, which need to be performed as root, are recorded in a shell script called root.sh. This script is written in the orainst directory. Apply the following patch to root.sh, to have it use to proper location of chown or alternatively run the script under a Linux native shell.

*** orainst/root.sh.orig Tue Oct 6 21:57:33 1998
--- orainst/root.sh Mon Dec 28 15:58:53 1998
***************
*** 31,37 ****
# This is the default value for CHOWN
# It will redefined later in this script for those ports
# which have it conditionally defined in ss_install.h
! CHOWN=/bin/chown
#
# Define variables to be used in this script
--- 31,37 ----
# This is the default value for CHOWN
# It will redefined later in this script for those ports
# which have it conditionally defined in ss_install.h
! CHOWN=/usr/sbin/chown
#
# Define variables to be used in this script

When you do not install Oracle from CD, you can patch the source for root.sh. It is called rthd.sh and is located in the orainst directory in the source tree.

10.6.4.2 Patching genclntsh

The script genclntsh is used to create a single shared client library. It is used when building the demos. Apply the following patch to comment out the definition of PATH:

*** bin/genclntsh.orig Wed Sep 30 07:37:19 1998
--- bin/genclntsh Tue Dec 22 15:36:49 1998
***************
*** 32,38 ****
#
# Explicit path to ensure that we're using the correct commands
#PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/ccs/bin export PATH
! PATH=/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin export PATH
#
# each product MUST provide a $PRODUCT/admin/shrept.lst
--- 32,38 ----
#
# Explicit path to ensure that we're using the correct commands
#PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/ccs/bin export PATH
! #PATH=/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin export PATH
#
# each product MUST provide a $PRODUCT/admin/shrept.lst

10.6.5 Running Oracle

When you have followed the instructions, you should be able to run Oracle as if it was run on Linux itself.