Installing Oracle App Server on Linux

Question

Hi,
Has anyone installed the App Server on Linux? Can they tell me if it was difficult, complicated, etc. bearing in mind that I am not a DBA, and have basically no experiance with this sort of stuff at all. So basically what I am asking is can you stick in the CDs and follow the install guide and get it done in half a day or less.
Cheers.

Answer 1

I would say that a half a day is grossly underestimating it, by my experience and what you indicate your level of expertise is. I ended up installing, getting to a fail point, uninstalling and re-doing. Some errors are "recoverable", but some do not seem to be (from my experience). I'd make a few recommendations. I have it installed on Mandrake 8.x (latest release, I think), which seems to be "doable" but I'd recommend going with a certified platform if you don't know what you are doing. Also, Mandrake had some quirks like their security management software which resets file permissions "behind the scenes". This was my first experience with Mandrake so it took me a while to figure out which files to edit/fix so that Enterprise manager would get the right data.
Read the readme!
Read the installation docs all the way through!
Read the release notes all the way through!
I had a NUMBER of problems, some specific to my platform (which is not certified by Oracle, so it's not their fault) and some which were covered in the readme. It took me a while to get everything right and I ended up struggling most with the Infrastructure install. Most likely that was due to my hardware & OS (Mandrake), but there are some issues in the release notes that are important. The reason I would restart many times is that I wanted the installation to go smoothly from start to finish so that I could better understand the requirements, etc. Examples of issues (which includes things from the readme/release notes and otn):
- either install PDKSH or link /bin/bash to /bin/ksh. /bin/ksh is listed in one of the scripts as the shell during installation configuration. This should be in the installation guide as a pre-requisite.
- install the sysstat package so the enterprise manager will show graphs, etc. This should be in the installation guide as a pre-requisite.
- link (symbolic) your perl binary to /usr/local/bin/perl
- I received numerous link errors due to two problems:
- genclntsh didn't have a good link command for my platform. There seems to be two work-arounds posted around here, but I chose to add -lgcc and -L/path/to/gcclib on the ld line. E-mail me if you want more details ([email protected]). My path was something like: /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i586-mandrake-linux-gnu/2.96 where I found the libgcc.a
- Reports server and Forms server failed because the link line was linking to libXm.2.1.so instead of libXm.2.0.1.so (or libXm.2.so, etc). The development team evidently used a later version of Motif than I had, so I fixed it in the forms and reports makefiles, respectively.
I can't remember, offhand, what else I had to do, but this covers it. Obviously, a lot of this depends upon the type of install you choose. I wanted the reports server, which requires the infrastructure, etc.
Good luck.
Jeff