Installation of Oracle Enterprise Linux on VMWare

Recently, Oracle announced and released it’s Enterprise linux. Time to check out what’s it all about!

While downloading the software from OTN, I was surprised to see there were no less than 8 discs, I downloaded all of them (a hefty 4.5 gigabytes) and found out after unzipping that the first 4 discs are installation discs and the other four contain only sources. The other four disks contain additional packages and software. So save yourself the bandwidth and cd-roms and start with the first four.

I do not have a spare machine for installing Linux so I installed VMWare Workstation and hooked up a 250 GB external harddisk. Let’s roll!

I use VMWare Workstation 5.0. I choose a pre-configured image which is named “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4”. I was told OEL and Red Hay linux are very similar, so that should work fine. The imagesize is 15 gigabytes, and initially my virtual machine has 256 MB of memory assigned.

Booting the OS in VMWare:

booting VMWare

As you can see, the interface is modern and very user-friendly.

Welcome to Oracle Enterprise Linux

I save myself the trouble of pondering what partition should be which size, so I let the setup decide.
Disk partitioning setup

 

OEL does find my virtual disk and I choose to install the partitions in the free space available.automatic partitioning

It creates a 512MB swapdrive and the remaining space is one logical volume group. The partition type is ext3. It's fortunate to see that the size of the swapfile meets the minimum requirements for installation of Oracle Application server (which is also 512MB).disk setup

In the Package group selection step you can choose which tools and utilities you wish to install. Note the Server Configuration package which still mentions Red Hat instead of Oracle!

Installation of Oracle Enterprise Linux on VMWare install7

 

After all steps are followed, the actual installation begins.

Installation of Oracle Enterprise Linux on VMWare install9

 

That’s all folks!

Installation of Oracle Enterprise Linux on VMWare install10

 

Some post-installation tasks; confirm the license agreement, set date and time and create a system user.

Installation of Oracle Enterprise Linux on VMWare install12

 

And… Thunderbirds are Go! Now everything is working, it’s time to install your own software.

Installation of Oracle Enterprise Linux on VMWare install14

 

As you see, installing Linux goes without any pain. All the hardware works without tweaking, as well as the KDE graphical user interface. Really, I took me a lot more time to write this blog than to do the actual install. My guess of the total installation time: about half an hour.

Next action for me: installing Oracle 10g for Linux. But I’ll save that for the next blog!

7 Comments

  1. Muzzail April 28, 2009
  2. Brian Shreeves November 14, 2008
  3. Aino Andriessen August 28, 2008
  4. Marco Gralike December 8, 2006
  5. Bas Klaassen December 8, 2006
  6. Howard Rogers December 7, 2006
  7. Sandor Nieuwenhuijs December 7, 2006