>For my personal workstations I’m using .deb-based distro’s (Ubuntu) and no rpm-based distro’s like CentOS/RH/Fedora.
So while trying to install Oracle XE on a VirtualBox Ubuntu 10 instance I started out with downloading “oracle-xe_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb” from the Oracle website. This was actually the 1st mistake I made due to the fact that the next step, using Ubuntu’s dpkg installer to install te package, seems to cause some problems. The software installs, configuration is possible, but starting the database ended up in error. The cause a corrupt database configuration it seems.
Google (my friend) informed me of the fact that I was not alone having these problems and luckily pointed me to answer, this great article from Todd Trichler:
There is now an apt-get repository up on oss.oracle.com for XE.
Just add: deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free
to /etc/apt/sources.list and then:
# wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle -O- | sudo apt-key add –
# apt-get update
# apt-get install oracle-xe
‘libaio’ and ‘bc’ are in the repository, so dependancies will pull them in if the user doesn’t have them. (Note: You will need to ‘sudo’ or have ‘root’ privileges to install XE.)