In all honesty, I’ve not managed to get Oracle working properly yet. When I upgraded my RedHat 7 machine to 8 it still worked, when I installed it from scratch it didn’t. This clearly shows that it’s possible to get Oracle 8i working, but I can’t say how!

For those that are interested, I found that it was easy to get the installer to complete, but I get the infamous “end of communication channel” error when trying to start an instance.