Installing Oracle on 64bit Linux

I have just installed Oracle DBMS server on RHEL (x86_64) for the first time. I have installed Oracle on Solaris and Windows tens of times, but this is my first real Linux install. I must say that I am not impressed. Installing on Solaris is a whole lot simpler. The two big issues were packages dependencies and poor documentation.

The installation would consistently fail during the linking process. Each time it failed required me to find out whay, install the required package, blow away the $ORACLE_HOME and oraInventory, and then start over. The list of required packages was well short. I also had to install both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of all the libraries it needed. So my dependancy list is this:

rpm -q --qf '%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE} (%{ARCH})\n' binutils compat-db control-center gcc gcc-c++ glibc glibc-common glibc-devel gnome-libs libstdc++ libstdc++-devel make pdksh sysstat xscreensaver libaio libaio-devel
binutils-2.15.92.0.2-21 (x86_64)
compat-db-4.1.25-9 (x86_64)
compat-db-4.1.25-9 (i386)
control-center-2.8.0-12.rhel4.5 (x86_64)
gcc-3.4.6-3 (x86_64)
gcc-c++-3.4.6-3 (x86_64)
glibc-2.3.4-2.25 (x86_64)
glibc-2.3.4-2.25 (i686)
glibc-common-2.3.4-2.25 (x86_64)
glibc-devel-2.3.4-2.25 (x86_64)
glibc-devel-2.3.4-2.25 (i386)
gnome-libs-1.4.1.2.90-44.1 (x86_64)
libstdc++-3.4.6-3 (x86_64)
libstdc++-3.4.6-3 (i386)
libstdc++-devel-3.4.6-3 (i386)
make-3.80-6.EL4 (x86_64)
pdksh-5.2.14-30.3 (x86_64)
sysstat-5.0.5-11.rhel4 (x86_64)
xscreensaver-4.18-5.rhel4.11 (x86_64)
libaio-0.3.105-2 (i386)
libaio-0.3.105-2 (x86_64)
libaio-devel-0.3.105-2 (x86_64)

I even made a sym link to shut it up too. It's probably naughty, but it worked!

ln -s /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.3 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.5

And that's what I had to do.

So, Oracle went down another notch in my estimation today. It shouldn't be that hard. The whole "Linux is a constantly moving target" line doesn't wash for me. Oracle will only install on certain, certified distro's. They have made themselves a manageable environment, yet they still make it hard.