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GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide
by Graham Williams 		Google

Preparing for Installation

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Check (and possibly modify) some system parameters.

Check how much memory you have: 

  $ grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo
If you have more than 500,000 kB (i.e., about 500MB) then all should be good. If you have less memory, you should still be able to install and run Oracle, but make sure you have enough swap space. Hans Schou reports running on a 800MHz, 256MB RAM laptop under Mandrake GNU/Linux. In general though, to improve the performance of your machine, a memory upgrade is always a good start! You can check the amount of swap space you have with: 

  $ grep SwapTotal /proc/meminfo
Anything more than 1,000,000 kB (i.e., about 1GB) is good. If you have less, make your swap partition bigger or else add some more swap with something like: 

  # dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=1024
  # mkswap swapfile
  # swapon swapfile

See Chapter 90 for further details on swap. Next: 

  $ df -k .
Anything greater than 400,000 kB available is good. Next: 

df -k /

Anything above 4,000,000 kB available is good. If you have less, delete some files, grow your root partition, buy a new hard drive, or install to a different partition (which means deviating from this guide.) Next: 

wajig install gcc make binutils libmotif3 lesstif2 rpm

Now, we need to create a dedicated user and two groups to install. For example, use oracle, oinstall, and dba for the user and the two groups respectively (deviating from these is not recommended.) Check whether they already exist or not: 

grep oinstall /etc/group
grep dba /etc/group
grep nobody /etc/group
id oracle
id nobody

If any of them don't exist, create them: 

/usr/sbin/groupadd oinstall
/usr/sbin/groupadd dba
/usr/sbin/groupadd nobody
/usr/sbin/useradd -g oinstall -G dba -p passwd -d /home/oracle oracle
/usr/sbin/useradd -g nobody nobody

Next, we need to create some directories and set permissions. 

mkdir -p /u01/app/oracle
mkdir -p /u02/oradata
chown -R oracle:oinstall /u01 /u02
chmod -R 775 /u01 /u02

Next, we need to check some kernel parameters. Run the following commands, check the output, and make the changes as required. 

/sbin/sysctl -a | grep sem
/sbin/sysctl -a | grep shm
/sbin/sysctl -a | grep file-max
/sbin/sysctl -a | grep ip_local_port_range

Output: 

kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128

kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648

fs.file-max = 65536

net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000

If you need to change any of the values, open up /etc/sysctl.conf in your favourite text editor (e.g., emacs21) and change the appropriate entries as follows: 

kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
fs.file-max = 65536
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000

Run /sbin/sysctl -p to apply the changes (only if you changed something of course.)

Add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf file: 

*               soft    nproc   2047
*               hard    nproc   16384
*               soft    nofile  1024
*               hard    nofile  65536

Add (or un-comment) the following lines in /etc/pam.d/login and /etc/pam.d/su: 

session    required     /lib/security/pam_limits.so

Because we are using the Bash shell add the following lines to the /etc/profile file: 

if [ $USER = "oracle" ]; then
      if [ $SHELL = "/bin/ksh" ]; then
            ulimit -p 16384
            ulimit -n 65536
      else
            ulimit -u 16384 -n 65536
      fi
fi

Create the following symlinks: 

ln -s /usr/bin/awk /bin/awk
ln -s /usr/bin/rpm /bin/rpm
ln -s /usr/bin/basename /bin/basename # Suggested by Giuseppe Sacco
ln -s /etc /etc/rc.d                  # Required for root.sh

Pretend that we are running RedHat (the installer won't run otherwise) by adding the following to the file /etc/redhat-release: 

Red Hat Linux release 2.1 (drupal)

Log in as user oracle 

su oracle

Add the following line to the end of /.bash_profile 

umask 022

Set/unset some environment variables: 

ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
ORACLE_SID=test
export ORACLE_BASE ORACLE_SID
unset ORACLE_HOME
unset TNS_ADMIN

Florian Beckmann notes to also change the value of ORATAB in $ORA_HOME/bin/dbstart and $ORA_HOME/bin/dbshut from 

  ORATAB=/var/opt/oracle/oratab

to 

  ORATAB=/etc/oratab

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