Is it Ok to intall 11g Enterprise edtion on Fedora 7?

Question

Hi,
I just moved to this 'Linux direction', and I installed Fedora 7 on my laptop, and now I want to install 11g Enterpirse editon on it, is it Ok?
Peter

Answer 1

No.
You mentioned doing this "for production"... well, if you don't mind "unsupported production", you can install Oracle on just about anything, including FreeBSD, Mandriva, Debian Etch and much else besides. Completely off-the-planet installations, in as much as Oracle won't touch you with a bargepole if/when you run into trouble.
For supported production, it has got to be Red Hat Enterprise Server, Suse Enterprise Server or the Asianux equivalent.
But even if you said to me 'support is not required, so long as it's robust', Fedora would be one of the last distros I'd use for "robust" deployments of Oracle. By design, Fedora is a highly experimental, cutting edge distro that seeks to incorporate the latest technologies as early as possible. Red Hat use Fedora as a sort of Beta version for what will be in the next release of their Enterprise Server product... so if you deploy on Fedora, you're really deploying on a beta product. That is not the definition of "robust"!
If you want a cheap, truly robust distro to install on, Oracle's own Enterprise Linux is a clone of Red Hat, but only costs (I think) US$99 per year. Being a binary clone of Red Hat, it's as robust as you can get.
If you want a completely free, truly robust distro to install on, Centos is a binary clone of Red Hat too, and costs nothing at all -but obviously, support is on the basis of public forums and community spirit.
If you want a completely odd-ball distro which offers stability and long-term prospects and which is also completely free of charge, I'd look at Ubuntu 6.06 LTE ("Long Term Edition") which will be supported (by the Ubuntu people, not by Oracle -this is completely whacky stuff as far as Oracle is concerned, remember!) for the next 5 years, if I recall correctly. I call that the odd-ball solution not because there's anything wrong with Ubunut but because installing Oracle onto a Debian-based distro as opposed to an RPM-based one is fraught with issues. It does work (at least, the simple stuff does... I certainly wouldn't want to try RAC on it!) and works well, but it's an alien implementation, so it's very much 'being brave" territory -but, for exactly that reason, it's fun too!
But seriously: Enterprise Linux if you can pay a little or Centos if you want completely free. As robust as they get.