My ongoing battle to get Oracle working on CentOS 5.3

Oracle Base has a fantastic article on how to get Oracle 11g Release 1 working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The fact that CentOS is a stripped version of RHEL is a good reason to be using it, because if there is one Linux that’s likely to be used in enterprise situations then it would be RHEL. All up I’m less than happy with Oracle and Documentum’s Linux installers. I know that they’re ports of what are essentially Windows products, but the fact is that if you’ve going to bother writing something in Java(Documentum) then you should at least make sure that it really is portable, otherwise why not just use C/C++ and be done with it. The main Oracle install I struggle to understand, since the Oracle XE install was so painless, zero to database in no time. It clearly doesn’t fit well into the Linux way of doing things though:

• It doesn't install services/scripts to /etc/init.d (or equiv).
• It doesn't setup users for you, i.e. install as root, run as oracle (yet it requires root privileges to do two tasks).
• Requires SELINUX to be disabled.

Delving into changing memory limits and such is another matter, I think it may be better to leave those to the user, just because they can fundamentally change/break the system. Ah, to go back to PostgreSQL, which I once thought difficult compared to MySQL.