I am SYS

The purpose of the complete install guide below is to have a fully functioning oracle 11gR2 client and software to run local database instances on Ubuntu 10.04. (UPDATE: I have confirmed this install guide works exactly as below for Ubuntu 10.10) There are some details of the Oracle installation on Linux guide that I have not mentioned in this document, because I have verifed this version of Ubuntu to already meet certain qualifications that don’t need to be changed.
Below is the list of required packages according to the 11gr2 install docs:

binutils-2.15.92.0.2
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3
elfutils-libelf-0.97
elfutils-libelf-devel-0.97
gcc-3.4.6
gcc-c++-3.4.6
glibc-2.3.4-2.41
glibc-common-2.3.4
glibc-devel-2.3.4
glibc-headers-2.3.4
libaio-devel-0.3.105
libaio-0.3.105
libgcc-3.4.6
libstdc++-3.4.6
libstdc++-devel-3.4.6
make-3.80
numactl-0.6.4.i386
pdksh-5.2.14
sysstat-5.0.5
unixODBC-2.2.11
unixODBC-devel-2.2.11

Here is the list of packages that I installed. Some packages from above were already installed, and some were not even available. The ones not available, I just ignored and after extensive testing, all seems to run fine.

NOTE: all commands below are ran as root (sudo su -) until “su – oracle”

apt-get install elfutils
apt-get install libaio1
apt-get install libaio-dev
apt-get install libstdc++6-4.4-dev
apt-get install numactl
apt-get install pdksh
apt-get install sysstat
apt-get install unixODBC-dev
apt-get install unixODBC

This will add the minimum installation group that will own the oracle software, create the oracle user, and allow the oracle user to run x sessions locally so you don’t have to login and logout for any of this installation. You may want to add your “normal” user to the oinstall group later.

groupadd oinstall
useradd -s /bin/bash -m -g oinstall oracle
passwd oracle
xhost local:oracle

The next two pieces of work will change various kernel settings and limits to be able to run database instances locally if you desire.

cp /etc/security/limits.conf /etc/security/limits.conf.bak
cat >> /etc/security/limits.conf
oracle              soft    nproc   2047
oracle              hard    nproc   16384
oracle              soft    nofile  1024
oracle              hard    nofile  65536
<Ctrl-C>

cp /etc/sysctl.conf /etc/sysctl.conf.bak
cat >> /etc/sysctl.conf
fs.aio-max-nr = 1048576
fs.file-max = 6815744
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 536870912
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 9000 65500
net.core.rmem_default = 262144
net.core.rmem_max = 4194304
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_max = 1048586
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 262144 262144 262144
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4194304 4194304 4194304
<Ctrl-C>

/sbin/sysctl -p

The below directories are the Oracle recommended Optimal Flexible Architecture (besides all the separation of physical devices)

mkdir -p /u01/app/oracle
chown -R oracle:oinstall /u01/app/oracle
chmod -R 775 /u01/app/oracle
mkdir -p /u01/app/oraInventory
chown -R oracle:oinstall /u01/app/oraInventory
chmod -R 775 /u01/app/oraInventory

ln -s /usr/bin/awk /bin/awk <-- this was so the root.sh script doesn't fail when trying to find awk

At this point you should have downloaded the two huge zip files from Oracle’s download page:

mv /home/michael/Downloads/linux_11gR2_database_* /home/oracle/
su - oracle
unzip linux_11gR2_database_1of2.zip
rm linux_11gR2_database_1of2.zip
unzip linux_11gR2_database_2of2.zip
rm linux_11gR2_database_2of2.zip

Here is the where the actual installation begins. You will get a nice GUI for this part.

cd database
./runInstaller

On the successive list of screens, select the following to install the database software without creating a test database.

"Install database software only"
"Single instance database installation"
"Enterprise Edition"
Oracle Base: "/u01/app/oracle"
Software Location: "/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1"
Inventory Directory "/u01/app/oraInventory"
oraInventory Group Name "oinstall"
Database Administrator Group "oinstall"
Database Operator Group "oinstall"

A list of prerequisites that are failed will be shown on the screen. I reviewed them and selected “Ignore All” since I verified all the packages were indeed available.
During the install there were a handful of errors about linking such as:
“Error in invoking target ‘idg4odbc’ of makefile ‘/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/ins_rdbms.mk’.”
“Error in invoking target ‘idg4odbc’ of makefile ‘/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/ins_rdbms.mk’.”
“Error in invoking target ‘install’ of makefile ‘/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1/ctx/lib/ins_ctx.mk’.”
“Error in invoking target ‘all_no_orcl’ of makefile ‘/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/ins_rdbms.mk’.
“Error in invoking target ‘utilities’ of makefile ‘/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/ins_rdbms.mk’.”

I was able to “Continue” past these errors and complete the installation and creation of database without anymore issues. I read a little bit online about some people having these errors and their GUI tools such as DBCA and Universal Installer not working normally, but I have tested the tools that I use and they seem to be fine.
After the install I placed the following lines in the /etc/profile to ensure the ORACLE_* environment variables get set properly after login for any local users:

export ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1
export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin

At this point, I moved some known *.ora files into the $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin directory to skip the tns setup
From here you should be able to use the oracle client tools to connect to existing databases on your network. Also, I was able to create an 11gR2 database instance locally without any more system changes, besides the normal instructions for creating an instance from the Oracle documentation.