
<h2><a href="http://badgertronics.com/hacks/oraclemac.gif">Oracle 8.1.7, SuSE 7.1, Mac OS 9</a></h2>

I'm a Mac person at heart -  I do all of my day-to-day work on a black
Powerbook, and I have a TiBook for play.  Since I'm working on my Oracle
DBA certification, I'd like to have a portable machine to install
Oracle on so that I can just sit out on a porch swing and experiment.
I don't like keeping my PC running (it's a pretty big power guzzler), and
since there's just one PC, I can't run Linux while my Bride plays Black
and White.

<p>

The obvious (?) answer is to use Virtual PC to run intel Linux, and
install Oracle on that.

<p>

It took me quite awhile to figure it out.  These sketchy instructions
assume you've succesffully installed oracle on Linux before and kind of
know what you're doing.


<h3>Installing SuSE 7.1</h3>

I'm a fan of the <a href="http://www.suse.com">SuSE</a> Linux distribution.
That's what I run Badgertronics on.  They seem to be the most professional
of the distributions (witness the RedHat 7.0 debacle), and they have
excellent Oracle support.  I went to CompUSA looking for a SCSI hard
drive to repalce a failing unit in Badgertronics, but I walked out instead
with the 7.1 SuSE box.

<p>

I'm using Virtual PC (from <a
href="http://www.connectix.com">Connectix</a>, version 4.0.2, the
Winsuck 98 Version (so it's not the 'out of the box working with
Linux' version).  The first major hurdle was just getting Linux to
boot.  I always got hangs at the "checking hardware" stage.  After
many hours of flailing about, I got it to boot reliably.  I'm not sure
which of these parameters actually does it, but having them all set
seems to work:

<ul>
  <li> Processor: MMX Enabled
  <li> PC Memory: 256 MB (my machine has 512M, so I'm not paging)
  <li> C Drive: a 3 gig statically sized volume
  <li> D,E Drives: None
  <li> CD Rom: Allow Booting from CD, Standard IDE Configuration
  <li> COM1 Port : to a text file
  <li> COM2 Port : to another text file
  <li> Networking : Enabled, sharing the Mac's IP address
</ul>

Once I got into YAST2 (the SuSE installer program), I partitioned the
disk image (with 256 MB of swap, the rest devoted to /), and completed
the installation.   If you have the disk space, make a bigger C
Drive.  the SuSE distribution is freaking *huge*, and even the "minimal"
installation takes up a large amount of space.


<h3>Prepping Oracle 8.1.7</h3>

Someone from work sent me a CD with a gzipped archive of the Orace
8.1.7 Enterprise Edition.  I slurped that off the CD and put it on the
local drive (doing the <code>gunzip -c zxf
/mnt/oracle-blah-blah.tar.gz | tar xf -</code> thing.  I like doing
that way instead of just a tar zxf so that multiple processors can
work on it if ya got 'em).  <code>chmod -R oracle:onistall</code> the
resulting tree.

<p>

Be sure to check out the <a href="http://www.suse.com/en/support/oracle/db/817_71.html">SuSE Notes on 7.1 vs 8.1.7</a>.  Grab the patch.

<p>

Log in as 'oracle', start X, and run the installer.  I had a problem
with KDE/oracleInstall sometimes not letting me type into text fields.
If that's the case, quit the installer, log out from your X session,
and log in again.

<p>

Jump through usual installer hoops.  For me, when I installed it on my
intel box, the net assistant and db assistant worked OK.  On Virtual
PC, they failed. Go ahead and let them fail. (or if they don't fail,
interrupt the db assistant so it doesn't create the initial database.)

<p>

Apply the patch (uncompress the .gz file, untar it into $ORACLE_HOME,
run the script mentioned in the README file.  Sit back and wait) and
run the dbassist program manually.  Be sure to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
environemnt variable to be $ORACLE_HOME/lib.  If you get an
"** out of memory **" error on running, hack the dbassist startup
script and put the <code>-nojit</code> flag right after the $JRE_EXEC on
the last line.  Do the same with the netasst script.

<p>

Run dbassist, let it make the db.  Run netasst and do whatever violence
you want with that.  Have fun.