For the past week, excluding Tuesday when I was in Harrogate, I've been transferring my development environment over to my own personal laptop. I started off with WebSphere Studio, as I already had the installation media. It's aimed at Red Hat 7.2 or 8.0, or SuSE 7.2 or 8.1 (of course), but it installed perfectly in a 32-bit chroot on my Ubuntu Dapper AMD64 Operating System.

So then I moved onto Oracle. Not just any old version of Oracle. Our production platform is running 9.2.0.1 with patches, so I wanted to get as close to that as I possibly could, which turned out to be 9.2.0.4. It has a 64-bit version available, so I downloaded all 1.5GB of installation media and burned it to DVD. I was sent a script by our support guy who'd installed the same version on our DR kit. It was a bash script that checked your system to make sure it would be happy with Oracle. Apart from a couple of tools (gawk, env) not being where expected (solved with a couple of symlinks) and some kernel parameters that needed to be tuned, the only thing it found wrong was that Ubuntu Dapper wasn't a certified platform for Oracle 9.2.0. Well there's a surprise, considering Oracle 9.2.0.4 pre-dates Ubuntu by a couple of years.

Anyway, satisfied that all would be hunky-dory, I set up the user anf groups and proceeded to run the installer anyway. I entered the required information about what I was installing (Database), what type of installation (Enterprise), what type of database (None) and left it to go. It hung up at 17% saying:

Installing Oracle Required Support Files 32 bit 9.2.0.1.0
Link Pending...


Copying naeet.o

I left it for a while, but no change. I checked the log file, which appeared to be written in some ancient dialect of OracleDeveloperBollocks and wasn't much use. So I cancelled the installation, cleaned up and Googled. And Googled. And Googled. Don't get me wrong, there's a wealth of information out there, just none of it useful. The most hopeful article I managed to find involved installing Oracle 10g Express from the Oracle Debian repository – which would surely be a less troublesome route to take, but it's the wrong version of Oracle. Alas, after a week of gnashing of teeth, symlinks, banging my head against the wall, installing old compatibility libraries, I think I'm just going to have to settle for it.