After my last failed Oracle 10g Express install due to insufficient memory, I purchased some memory from eBay, and started it over.

This time, the first thing the installer noticed was that the swap file is not big enough. I fixed that by doing a total re-install of Fedora Core 2. Yeah, I know that was kind of lame, but I got a few machines with me, so I didn’t waste time waiting for it.

Started again, this time the install went through, but I got some error messages at the end. The message was “groupadd: unable to lock group file”. The problem was that there were passwd.lock and gshadow.lock files under /etc. I then removed those files.

I tried to reinstall the RPM package. The message I got back was that it was already setup. I then ran:

rpm -e oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm

to remove it.

Finally, I was able to install it correctly.

It was a good exercise. I’ve done some Oracle database administration stuff, but never installation and setup stuff. I would like to bring my Oracle skill to the next level, so this is a good way to get started. 11g will come out within a week or so, but hopefully the skills I learned here can be transferred. I will give 11g a run when it comes out.

A few things learned:

1. yum is worth looking into. It is probably a better way to install or update dependencies than compiling binary or doing manual rpm install;
2. Got to be careful when typing. During profile setup, when I tried to put . /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin/oracle_env.sh into /etc/profile, I missed the blank between the dot and forward slash. This shell script sets up $ORACLE_HOME and $ORACLE_SID for you;
3. Here is a good site for 10g Express setup on Linux.