Oracle & Linux - Unworkable?

Oracle & Linux - Unbreakable, are the words of Oracle trying to get everyone to run their software on the Linux platform. In my experience of Oracle & Linux, I'd use the word Unworkable to describe the combination. I recently purchased some new hardware to upgrade my main PC & provide me with a dedicated SuSE 9.1 Pro box to add to my collection of computer's. As I am currently studying for my OCP, I thought it made sense to get Oracle DB running on this box, as who'd ever want to run Oracle in an enterprise environment on a Windows box? How foolish I was.

I started off by trying to run the Oracle Installer from the command line, & received a not so friendly, java runtime library error, even though the jre being run was being copied from the Oracle installation disk. No problem I thought simply find the relevant config file & point to the jre located in my /usr filesystem. Problem solved installer started.

Nextup, installation "starts" & gets stuck at 0% complete. It wasn't going anywhere. Googled for the problem, what a surprise, lots of people have had this problem. There appeared to be one website that everyone referred to to get Oracle running on Linux (although aimed at RHES)(http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle9i.html), I followed these instructions & still didn't manage to get anywhere. I'd spent many hours on this & finally gave up for now. Although this is never the attitude to have when working with computers, I knew I didn't have to run Oracle on Linux, I could just put it on my Solaris box & job done.

It astounds me that Oracle support for Linux is so poor, looking at SuSE's Oracle compatibility matrix (http://www.suse.com/en/business/certifications/
certified_software/oracle/matrix.html) its clear that the only release of SuSE that seems to support Oracle satisfactorily is SuSE Enterprise Server v8 (which starts at minimum of $349 per year to run). This is all well in large enterprise environments, but what about everyone else. I'm very tempted now to replace my trusty SuSE box with a nice Solaris 10 build, on which Oracle will just work.

This experience has convinced me that open source platforms are best suited to open source software & proprietary platforms are there for proprietary software. I'd be interested to hear anyone's comments on this, as I recently got SpamAssassin & Postfix running on Solaris 9, but it was not easy. And if you're not careful you can find SpamAssassin will bring down a Solaris build within 10 minutes of the spamc process being started, if it can't find a certain Perl library. You have been warned.

@misc{svensson2004-oracle-linux-unworkable,
  author = {Conor Svensson},
  title = {{Oracle \& Linux - Unworkable?}},
  year = {2004},
  month = sep,
  url = {https://conorsvensson.com/archive/blogspot/oracle-linux-unworkable/}
}