Every Flavour Beans

I finally decided to try installing the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition on Ubuntu 6.10 operating system when a CD containing the 10.2 version of the software was shipped with the book from Oracle Press. The book explains the installation procedure in quite a bit of detail, but I soon gave up the temptation to install the software from the .deb package carried by the CD as a later version of the software was available in the online repository. I searched for the repository on the Internet that stores the Oracle Database XE and found the following link on Oracle’s website:
Installing Oracle Database XE on Debian, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu

It becomes a trivial process after going through the above article and adding the specified line in the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

Search for ‘oracle-xe’ in the Synaptic Package Manager(Edit -> Search), mark all the necessary packages and click “Apply”.

Or install simply from the command line using the apt-get command(search for the packages using ’sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-cache search oracle-xe’ command). The latest version will be downloaded and installed on the system. I encountered a minor problem during the process though: the installation wouldn’t proceed because of the following error:

Oracle Client 10g Express Edition require 1024MB of swap space. This system has 996MB of swap space. Configure more swap space on the system and retry the installation.

The documentation says that the installer checks to see whether 1GB of swap is available if 1GB of RAM is installed on the system. I had given 1000MB as the size for the swap partition(easier to type than 1024) and the installer is dumb enough to stop for 28MB of less memory that expected. After a quick confirmation on the Oracle forum, I added some more temporary swap memory using the following procedure and repeated the installation process.

I needed only 100MB of additional swap space, so ‘count’ might be different for you if you come across the same problem. Once the installation is finished, the swap file can be deleted after running ’swapoff /tmp/swap’ command to immediately reclaim the disk space(100MB hardly mattered in my case) or one can just wait until the next reboot(and remove the file if /tmp is not automatically cleared on your system). If you need to create permanent additional swap space, then the swap file need to be created at a different location than /tmp and the ’swapon /where-ever/swap’ command need to be put where it will be executed every time the system boots.

Configuration of Oracle 10g XE

The final step of the installation is to configure the Oracle Database XE. Start a shell and run the following command (you can accept the default values suggested for most of the question by hitting the ENTER key):

One question that deserves a careful thought is whether or not you want to start the Oracle Database server automatically at boot time. If you choose to start it up at boot time, it will always be running as a service in the background and consumes resources. If you choose not to automatically start it at the boot time, you have to manually start it whenever you want to access your databases. Setting a password for the standard user accounts ’sys’ and ’system’ is also part of the configuration process.

Once finished, the Oracle Database XE server will be running on the port as specified at the end of the configuration process and you can administer the DBMS by pointing your web browser to http://localhost:8080/apex(unless you changed the port number) and logging in using the user name ’system’ and the password you created during the configuration process. Below is a screenshot of how the administration panel looks like in a web browser.

Two menu items will also be created containing links to documentation, online forum, and other services provided by Oracle Database XE.

The default menu items created by the Oracle installer were too long to my taste, so I shortened them from the Menu Layout manager(Right-click on “Applications” menu, select “Edit Menus”, right-click the Oracle menu items, select “Properties” and change the text in the “Name:” field).

If you are a Fedora or a Suse user, installing Oracle DBMS has been supported on these platforms for a very long time. Search google for installation instructions.

Gentoo users should checkout the Gentoo Wiki article describing how to install Oracle 10g Express Edition on Gentoo systems. It’s a laborious process though.

After the installation is complete, use the Oracle 10g XE getting started guide available on the Oracle website to learn how to do simple tasks with the DMBS from the web browser interface.