Oracle Database XE: Installing on a Linux Platform

Linux Installation Tasks

This section covers the Linux installation tasks: determining operating system prerequisites, obtaining the installation files, performing the installation, and testing out your installation. There are a few more setup tasks in the Linux environment than in a Windows environment.

Linux Prerequisites

In addition to the general Oracle Database XE requirements listed earlier in this chapter, there are some Linux-specific requirements explained in the following sections. Be sure to follow these instructions carefully. Your installation may succeed if you ignore some of these requirements, but you will most likely run into performance problems later if your environment is not configured correctly.

Linux Distribution

You must be using one of the Linux distributions from the following list:

1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, version 3 or 4
   
2. SUSE Linux SLES-9 or higher 
    
3. Fedora Core 4 
    
4. Red Flag DC Server 5.0 / Miracle Linux 4.0 / Haansoft Linux 2006 Server (Asianux 2.0 Inside) 
    
5. Debian 3.1

While your installation may work fine for testing and development on other Linux distributions, Oracle will not support them and strongly recommends that you do not deploy any production applications on a nonsupported distribution.

Required Packages

Regardless of the Linux distribution, you must also ensure you have these packages installed:

1. glibc 2.3.2 or later 
    
2. libaio 0.3.96 or later

See the installation instructions for your Linux distribution to install or update these packages. All of the Linux distributions listed previously include these packages in their distribution media.