Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition on CentOS 4

The short story is that if you have a standard configuration things should work entirely as you’d expect. That is, download the archive which, these days, comes as a RedHat “rpm” file. Become “root” and enter “rpm -ivh oracle-xe.rpm” and wait a bit. The install goes away and creates all the required users, starts up the listener and creates a default empty database.

CentOS, for those that have not come across it, is a Linux operating system built from the same source package as RedHat Enterprise Linux but without the support contract.

The first thing to note is that the few problems that I had were probably my own fault. Hardware was the main one. At home I’ve moved almost exclusively to Macs, and the one x86 Linux machine is a Via C3 running at 533Mhz and only has 512Mb of memory, both some way below Oracle’s recommended minimum.

So I downloaded the oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm file, switched to root and entered rpm -ivh oracle-xe.rpm. And it didn’t work.

On the plus side, it told me exactly what the problem was: I didn’t have libaio installed. I installed it (yum install libaio) and tried again.

It worked!

It took a long time to create and start the database, but this is Oracle and this is an old, slow machine, and everything I have tried so far is operating correctly.

To be honest, the only problem I have found so far is that I can’t get the web admin interface working from a remote machine. If I click the button to enable the option, I get a blank page in Firefox and no luck from the Mac end. Bouncing the database (/etc/rc.d/init.d/oracle-xe restart) seemed not to make any difference.

If you come across any further problems (or solutions) please do add a comment below.

7 thoughts on “Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition on CentOS 4”

  1. This installed using the exact same technique. Worked great on my 1.2Ghz 768mb Trixbox/Asterisk (CentOS 4) box. Now I can do my work from home without connecting to the VPN!!!

  2. Do the following to enable remote HTTP access.
    Go to the database homepage and log in as user sys, http://127.0.0.1:8080/apex is the default.

    Click on Administration and then Manage HTTP access to change remote access.

  3. Willem, many thanks for your tip. I will try it out next time I try to install Oracle.

    Omofuma, I’m afraid that I’ve not tried to install on CentOS 5.0. My suspicion is that it will work pretty much out of the box. If not there should be some “compat-XXX.rpm” options that come with CentOS. These come with RedHat and are used to provide compatibility with the previous version.

    Had anyone else tried?

  4. Willem, how can i do it without the web management console? do you know?

    thanks!

  5. The screen for client http access blanking out is a known issue, but should still work.

    If you have SQL*PLUS going, you can always just use:
    SQL> EXEC DBMS_XDB.SETLISTENERLOCALACCESS(FALSE);

  6. Ugh, thanks. 2:15 am on Saturday/Sunday, and I come up on your site! CentOS 4.7 x86_64 here. Was getting those $#$^^&&$ linking errors and going nuts. I installed all packages as you listed, so whatever difference there was between your list and the oracle documentation, it did the trick.

    If I could buy you a beer right now, I would!

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