Installing ORACLE 9i on RHEL5

Note: I have installed it successfully on "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 (Tikanga)" 32 bit. Please understand; it involves tweaking of Kernel parameters, so take care while you do that.

Steps:
1. Create oracle User AccountLogin as root and create te user oracle which belongs to dba group.$ su - root
# groupadd dba# useradd -g dba oracle
2. Setting System parameters:Edit the /etc/sysctl.conf with an editor like vi and add following lines:kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 536870912
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
fs.file-max = 65536
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000
net.core.rmem_default=262144
net.core.wmem_default=262144
net.core.rmem_max=262144net.core.wmem_max=262144
Note: You need to execute "sysctl -p" to apply the above settings.
3. Setting Oracle EnviromentEdit the /home/oracle/.bash_profile file and add following lines:ORACLE_BASE=/opt/oracle
ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/920
ORACLE_SID=orcl
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib
ORACLE_OEM_JAVARUNTIME=/opt/jre1.3.1_15
PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
export ORACLE_BASE ORACLE_HOME ORACLE_SID LD_LIBRARY_PATH ORACLE_OEM_JAVARUNTIME PATH
Save the .bash_profile and execute following commands to load the new environment:
# cd /home/oracle.
# .bash_profile
4. Create base directory for OracleLogin as root and create base directory for Oracle ($ORACLE_BASE).
$ su - root
# cd /opt
# mkdir oracle# chown oracle:dba oracle
5. Download and install required .rpm packagessome additional packages may be required for successful installation . To check whether required packages are installed on your operating system use following command:

rpm -q gcc glibc-headers glibc-kernheaders glibc-devel compat-libstdc++ cpp compat-gcc
6. Download the Java Runtime Enviroment (I used j2re-1_3_1_19-linux-i586.bin) from the Sun website. Login as root, give the file execute permission and then execute it. When the JRE is exracted move the same under the directory "/usr/local" directory.# chmod +x j2re-1_3_1_19-linux-i586.bin
# ./ j2re-1_3_1_19-linux-i586.bin
# mv jre1.3.1_19 /usr/local/
7. Download the Oracle 9i (9.2.0.4) software from Oracle website. Extract the files using following command:

gunzip ship_9204_linux_disk1.cpio.gz
gunzip ship_9204_linux_disk2.cpio.gz
gunzip ship_9204_linux_disk3.cpio.gz
cpio -idmv "<" ship_9204_linux_disk1.cpio
cpio -idmv "<" ship_9204_linux_disk2.cpio
cpio -idmv "< "ship_9204_linux_disk3.cpio
mv Disk* /home/oracle/
chown –R oracle:dba Disk*

When all archives were extracted you've got three directories Disk1, Disk2 and Disk3.
Edit the Disk1/install/linux/oraparam.ini and modify JRE_LOCATION variable and set path to our JRE installation from Step 6. JRE_LOCATION=/usr/local/jre1.3.1_19 4.

Start the Oracle software installation process. To start the installation process; execute the following commands:

$ cd Disk1
$ ./runInstaller

***************************************************
Errors with solutions:
1. When network configuration assistant and database configuration assistant has failed during startup then do following steps:
Solution:
$ cd /opt/oracle/920
$ rm JRE $ ln -s /usr/local/jre1.3.1_19 JRE
$ su - root
# cd /opt/oracle/920/JRE/bin # ln -s java jre
# cd i386/native_threads
# ln -s java jre
2. If you encounter the following error:
ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/bin/httpd: error while loading shared libraries: libdb.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Solution: Create a symbolic link
$ su - root
# ln -s /usr/lib/libgdbm.so.2.0.0 /usr/lib/libdb.so.2
3. If you encounter something like below at the very beginning of installation:
error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Solution:
$ su - root
# cd /usr/lib
# ln -s libstdc++-3-libc6.2-2-2.10.0.so libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2
Now, run the installer again:
$ ./runInstaller
****************************************************
Note: If you encounter any more errors, please post it here