Installing Oracle XE under Debian/(K)Ubuntu – it’s easier than Windows

Yesterday I installed Oracle XE at my Ubuntu Linux server at
home. I wanted to do this for a long time but was a bit scared because
installing non open source applications under Linux can be really painful. I
searched on google and found a tutorial on OTN. That’s a  promising start.

My server has the “Breezy” version of Ubuntu installed, but
other versions should also work (Ubuntu is built on Debian, so Debian also
works)

Log in as root user  (sudo su under Ubuntu)

First you have to add a repository to your sources.list (located at /etc/apt/sources.list):
deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

No update you repository:
apt-get update

And execute the command to install Oracle XE:
apt-get install oracle-xe

Oracle XE will be downloaded now, you have to press Y a few times and finally you get the following message:

 
Let’s do that then. You’re now asked for the port numbers of
Oracle Application Express  (apex) and
the database listener. I initially thought it was a good idea to run apex on
port 80 (because Tomcat was already running on port 8080). But I got some
errors and finally found  out that
running it on a port lower than 1024 wasn’t such a good idea after all.

The final steps are entering a password for SYS and SYSTEM
and tell the system you want to load Oracle on boot time.

Now go to http://localhost:8080/apex
and you’re ready to go.

Problems I ran into

The first problem was that I didn’t have enough swap space.
Luckily the article on OTN gave me the solution to this problem.

The next problem was that I wanted to run apex on port 80.
That wasn’t such a good idea so I had to change the port number.

Changing the portnumber can be done in sqlplus (located at /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin)

SQL&gt; begin<br /><br /><span>&nbsp;</span>2<span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>dbms_xdb.sethttpport('8081');<br /><br /><span>&nbsp;</span>3<span>&nbsp; </span>end;<br /><br /><span>&nbsp;</span>4<span>&nbsp; </span>/<br /><br /><br /><br />PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Conclusion

I never thought it would be this easy to install an
application like Oracle on Linux. I have some experience with Linux, but I
think anyone who can use Oracle can install it on Linux.  The Debian package system works great, it
downloads all the dependencies and takes care of installation and uninstallation.

Sources

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/install/xe-on-kubuntu.html

http://daust.blogspot.com/2006/01/xe-changing-default-http-port.html

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/htdocs/oracleonlinux_faq.html