* If you want to install 9i on any new linux (RH 7.1, Debian Woody, etc) read this *

Question

A lot of people are having issues installing Oracle 9i on the newer distributions..
I do not want to take credit for this fix, as I found it in one of the other topics in this forum (I cant remember who posted it), but it a few replies down and I decided to make it the main post here ..
The problem with the installation, as was stated in the other post, is with the linking, and the version of 'ld' on your system (/usr/bin/ld) .. The newer distro's come with a patched ld (which was said to be a GLIBC 2.1 emulation patch for Oracle 8i) .. This ld is patched in RedHat 7.1, and Debian 2.3 Unstable/Woody (the distro I use)..
To install Oracle clean .. go to ftp.gnu.org (or mirror), and go into gnu/binutils, and grab binutils-2.10.tar.gz ... run a configure on it (no parameters necessary), and run make ..
When its done compiling everything, make a copy of your original ld (cp /usr/bin/ld /usr/bin/ld.orig), and copy the newly compiled one to that location .. (cp ld/ld-new /usr/bin/ld) .. run the oracle installer (it should install and link without error), and then copy your original ld back (cp /usr/bin/ld.orig /usr/bin/ld) ..
Worked perfectly for me on three installs (under Debian 2.3 Unstable/Woody) ..
If you've already installed Oracle 9i, then after replacing ld with the new one, run 'relink all', and then copy it back ..
(you may be able to get away with making a bin directory in oracle's home, and adding that to the beginning of your path with ld in it .. haven't tried it yet, but it may work without needing to temporarily replace the system ld)
I'm sorry to the person that originally suggested the unpatched ld .. I thank you for the suggestion :)
-Terry

Answer 1

Linking was still failing for me on my
system. I have Red Hat 7.1 and I was
trying to install Oracle9i Database.
The error I had while the system was trying
to build libclntsh.so.9 (built by genclntsh) was
/lib/libc.so.6: undefined reference to `_dl_lazy@GLIBC_2.1.1'
/lib/libc.so.6: undefined reference to `_dl_dst_substitute@GLIBC_2.1.1'
/lib/libc.so.6: undefined reference to `_dl_out_of_memory@GLIBC_2.2'
/lib/libc.so.6: undefined reference to `_dl_relocate_object@GLIBC_2.0'
/lib/libc.so.6: undefined reference to `_dl_clktck@GLIBC_2.2'
As well as an undefined reference to
__cmpdi2.
I just hacked my way out by adding the
libraries that seem to contain these symbols.
I just completed the installation and my
setup seems to be working.
My linking problems was resolved by
changing the following line in genclntsh:
SYSLIBS=`cat ${ORACLE_HOME}/lib/sysliblist`" -L/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-redhat-linux/2.96 -lgcc -ldl -lm -lc /lib/ld-linux.so.2"
#SYSLIBS=`cat ${ORACLE_HOME}/lib/sysliblist`" -ldl -lm -lc"
(The commented out line was the original
line). Basically __cmpdi2 is defined in
libgcc.a and the other dl symbols are
define in /lib/ld-linux.so.2.
Hope this helps someone.
BTW, the change is done during the install,
when the system starts linking, an
error message is displayed. I made the
fix, than manually ran
sh -x /home/dba/OraHome1//bin/genclntsh
in the /home/dba/OraHome1/plsql/lib directory
(where the offending makefile was failing).
When genclntsh succeeded, I simply clicked
on retry in the install popup and the Oracle
installation proceeded with no additional
hickups
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