Installing Oracle XE on openSUSE Linux

Despite what I have read on the net it was quite easy. I decided to put the information on the net in case I would have to repeat the procedure. And maybe someone else would need the information...

First I'll tell you what machine I use, then I'll show you what I did.

The machine

I use HP Compaq 6710b laptop, with 2G of RAM. Inside the machine is the Intel® Core™2 Duo T7300 2GHz processor.
There is Windows Vista preinstalled in it, but I decided to use OpenSuse (10.3) Linux as my development environment.

Installation procedure

You could summarize the whole process in 3 steps:
1. Obtaining the installation file.
2. Installing Oracle XE and required libraries.
3. Configuring Oracle instance.

In my case the procedure went as follows:
1. I downloaded Oracle XE for Linux x86 (http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/xe/htdocs/102xelinsoft.html). I chose oracle-xe-univ-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm.

2. Logged as the root I run the installer. Everything went smooth except for the database didn't run. I checked the installation guide (I know, I should have done it earlier :-) ) and it turned out that this Oracle distribution requires libgc and libaio libraries.

I ran software management program (/sbin/yast2 --install) that lets you see and modify software components installed on your openSUSE.
In my case the libraries where absent so I looked for them on openSUSE Build Service pages (http://software.opensuse.org/searchand), downloaded and installed them.

3. The final step, according to the manual was running the provided configuration script. So I did, as the root, ran

/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure

I chose the default options when prompted and set up the password for sys and system users:

Do you want Oracle Database 10g Express Edition to be started on boot (y/n) [y]:y
Starting Oracle Net Listener...Done
Configuring Database...Done
Starting Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Instance...Done
Installation Completed Successfully.
To access the Database Home Page go to "http://127.0.0.1:8080/apex"

I tried to run the database's home page by running FireFox and entering http://127.0.0.1:8080/apex address.

Unfortunately I couldn't log in (I probably did something wrong but I am not sure what was it -- maybe just misspelled the password during log-in),
so I opened "Run SQL command line" and typed:

conn sys as sysdba ;
alter user system identified by ;
alter user sys identified by ;

After this maneuver I retried entering user/password and finally successfully logged into the database's home page.

Like I said, I am not sure if the last step (resetting the password) was necessary. When I have a chance to run the installation again I'll correct the information.

Have fun with Oracle on openSUSE!