Installing OBIEE 11g on OEL 5u5 64 bit : invalid entry CRC

Question

I am trying to install OBIEE 111130 64 on a Virtual Box with OEL 5 update 5 64 bit but I cannot get past an "invalid entry CRC" error.
I managed to get the RCU running. I managed to get the Weblogic running as a separate install using the Sun JDK 64 bit. But the OBIEE Software Only install keeps running in the "invalid entry CRC" error (as does any other type of install available).
I tried downloads from OTN and eDelivery, but both sites seem to give me faulty downloads that fail with this error (though cksum says all is well).
I tried default unarchive tool in OEL5 as well as the Oracle 'recommended' tool from eDelivery to see if that made any difference but that did not help.
I tried unarchive tool as well as Stuffit on Apple host but that also did not make any difference.
Has anyone ever had this problem and found a (repeatable) solution, or does really know how to get past this ?
Has anyone ever installed OBIEE 111130 64 on OEL 5u5 64 bit, by the way ? Does Oracle support it (I could not find a clear answer).

Answer 1

Well, I found the solution.
First of all : download from eDelivery using a cable connection (and not a wireless connection) for optimal stability of your download.
Then : run the MD5 and SHA-1 checks to see if you really got what you wanted.
Then, in Virtualbox for the Oracle Enterprise Linux 5u5 64bit guest OS : set its memory to 2Gb MAX !!!
I noticed that I kept running into memory allocation problems (no more CRC's now, hurray!) that said that the host was out of memory. That surprised me because I have 8Gb onboard and the Virtualbox was set to use only 3584MB (also strange, Virtualbox does not allow for more ...). But that was too much apparently because ALL my memory was consumed somehow.
Then start your Virtualbox not via the window application but by using the following commandline:
Virtualbox -startvm <yourboxname>
This way you get messages on the commandline you would otherwise not see.
By the way, I run Virtualbox on a Mac Book Pro with 8 Gb or RAM.
And then in your Virtual machine unpack your freshly downloaded zips using one of the unzippers 'recommended' by Oracle (see the last lines of the eDelivery page).
After setting all this the Software Only installation of OBIEE 11g went well, but ... I had to run the installer with an extra parameter that I only discovered after studying the .sh script:
*./runInStaller -jreloc <java-64bit-home-dir>*
This -jreloc parameter points to the home directory where I installed (as root) my Sun Java 64bit JDK. In this way I ensured that my installation process uses the proper JVM.
The parameter is not documented (as far as I can see) but can be found in the runInstaller script. So I tried it and it worked like a charm.
When I did some more investigation I found out that Virtualbox (as well as VMWare Fusion) on the Mac are 32bit applications that might run 64bit guests, but always with restrictions somewhere as is seems. Now VMWare Fusion allows for more than 3.5Gb of memory to allocate to a VM, but I have not tried that yet (but I will soon).
Nevertheless, be it the Mac that messes up memory allocation to a 32bit app or be it Virtualbox that messes with memory, the lesson learned is to be cautious with large amounts of memory in Virtualbox. At least I can continue installing OBIEE 11g and make my customer happy.
Zoef zoef.