Oracle database installation is not simple procedure. And it may take hours even days if something goes wrong. Here are some useful tutorial links and explanations. Hopefully with these instructions, installing oracle database is no longer or less painful.

• 10g Express

Oracle 10g XE is a free version for development, deployment and distribution. The installation instructions are easy to follow:

How to install Oracle 10g XE on Ubuntu

How to install Oracle 10g XE on 64-bit Ubuntu

• 10g

Unlike XE version, the standard one is much harder to install, here is a very helpful guide:

How to install Oracle 10g on Linux

• 11g

11g is by the time of this blog the latest released version, finding an installation guide should not be difficult with google. This is a good tutorial that I have tested and worked.

How to install Oracle 11g on Ubuntu

• Startup the database

The following commands work only for user oracle, or the DBA user name you have created when you installed the database, oracle is the default DBA user name. To start the database after installation, first of all there are few things to check:

gist 5555490 check_oracle_env.sh

verify if the value corresponds to your database settings

Now we can go

gist 5555490 start_oracle.sh

and by then you should see that the database has been started successfully. The job may not be finished yet, your should check if the listener is active :

gist 5555490 start_lsnr.sh

if the listener is already started, it will do nothing. We can now test the database connection:

gist 5555490 test_connection.sh

• Tips

  1. LRM-00109: could not open parameter file, here is the expert’s explanation and solution.
  2. Connect from a X-Windows enabled terminal with trusted X11 forwarding: > ssh -X oracle@server_hostname_or_ip