Everything I do in linux seems to be an adventure. That couldn't be more true for Oracle 10g. After fighting with the installer, monkeying around with the ALUI database scripts and editing the start-up script, I got the database to start, but it would only shut down immediately afterword. Drats!

This morning, I deleted every trace of Oracle 10g from my system and attempted an install of Oracle 9i. The adventure begins . . . .

First off, Oracle 9i requires JRE 1.3.1, which Sun is planning to retire very soon (as soon as Java 6 comes out). Damn, I remember working on Java 1.0 -- am I getting old?

JRE 1.3.1 doesn't install cleanly on Fedora Core 5. Then again, does anything? Java is closed-source -- meaning you can't build it yourself -- so once again I was in a linux bind. When I tried to unpack the 1.3.1 JRE I downloaded from Sun, it gave me this:

tail: `-1' option is obsolete; use `-n 1' since this will be removed in the future

Unpacking...

tail: cannot open `+486' for reading: No such file or directory

Checksumming...

1 The download file appears to be corrupted. [etc]

I downloaded the file again a few times to make sure it really wasn't corrupted. Of course it wasn't.

Then I found this great blog post that explained exactly what was going wrong and offered an easy fix. Easy, that is, if you're a developer. (I'm becoming more and more convinced every day that linux is not at all poised to take over the desktop unless the entire earth's population goes out and gets a CS degree.)

Alas, the antiquated JRE was really to roll and now it was time to run the Oracle installer. Of course, that didn't run either. Instead, it spat out JRE errors;

Error occurred during initialization of VM

Unable to load native library: /tmp/OraInstall2006-08-19_11-59-35AM/jre/lib/i386/libjava.so: symbol __libc_wait, version GLIBC_2.0 not defined in file libc.so.6 with link time reference

Nice. Back to Google.

The fix this time came (ironically) from IBM's web site. No problem, just make a change to libcwait.c, recompile it as a shared object and then set the LD_PRELOAD variable. I'm sure my mom could do that, right?

Then of course I had the standard "this only works under X" problem, but I had already figured that one out. Here's the error:

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server

Xlib: No protocol specified

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.InternalError: Can't connect to X11 window server using ':0.0' as the value of the DISPLAY variable.

at sun.awt.X11GraphicsEnvironment.initDisplay(Native Method)

at sun.awt.X11GraphicsEnvironment.(X11GraphicsEnvironment.java:59)

at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)

at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:120)

at java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment(GraphicsEnvironment.java:58)

at java.awt.Window.(Window.java:188)

at java.awt.Frame.(Frame.java:315)

at java.awt.Frame.(Frame.java:262)

at oracle.sysman.oii.oiic.OiicInstaller.main(OiicInstaller.java:593)

And the fix (as root):

%>xhost +

%>xterm &

%>su - oracle

%>/tmp/Disk1/runInstaller &

And finally, the Oracle 9i installer launched. Now of course it's totally hung at 18% on "Linking Oracle Net Required Support Files" and it's been stuck there since before I started writing this blog post.

Gotta love it.