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Obtaining a copy of the Oracle 9i database is easy. Just go to the
Oracle web site, click on
Download and follow the path based on the distribution. There
are few pages you must read before you get to the download links. These pages
contain copyright and agreement information, which I suggest you
read carefully. All the other information is just statistics.
If you are not a member, you have to register on
the Oracle web site to be granted access to any distribution,
which can be downloaded for free.
The server distributions are in 3 files, named something like:
- lnx_920_disk1.cpio.gz
- lnx_920_disk2.cpio.gz
- lnx_920_disk3.cpio.gz
Other versions might have different names, but the installation could
be considered similar.
According to Oracle's installation instructions there are 2 sources,
that can be used - CDs and Hard Disk Installation. I used the first
one. Downloading the distribution files and creating the CDs (see next
item) is a time consuming operation, so arm yourself with patience.
This will also require a lot of hard disk space. The 3 distribution files
are around 1.5 GB. You will need as much as 3 times this space if you
intend to keep the archives, the directories and CD images on your hard disk
until you are sure that the CDs are created correctly.
Assuming that you are in the directory where the distributions are
downloaded, execute the following with all 3 distribution files
from a shell:
gunzip lnx_920_disk1.cpio.gz
cpio -idmv < lnx_920_disk1.cpio
These commands will create 3 directories, called Disk1, Disk2 and
Disk3.
Writing information to CD in Linux is covered completely in
CD-Writing-HOWTO, so the following will be only specific steps for
the Oracle distributions.
Creating the CD images
The first step is to create the CD images for the 3 CDs of the Oracle
distribution. Just execute the following
sequence for all 3 directories, changing the filenames
and directory names for each command:
mkisofs -r -o ora9id1.iso Disk1/
This will create 3 ISO CD images, which will be used further in the
installation process. The command may generate a lot of warnings
for name substitutions. Don't worry. The images will contain the
correct directory tree information. To check if this is true, mount
the images to a directory by using the loopback device (your kernel
should support loopback devices to perform this test) as described
in CD-Writing-HOWTO:
mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop=/dev/loop0 cd_image mount_dir
where cd_image is your resulting CD image from the mkisofs command.
After mounting, you can change directory and check the mounted
directory tree to ensure it looks okay. If everything is fine, you can move to
the next step.
Burning the CDs
Burning the CD images on CDs can be done with any command line or
GUI program that uses ISO CD images to create CDs. See
CD-Writing-HOWTO for details. Make sure however, that after burning
the CDs they contain exactly the same directory trees as
directories Disk1, Disk2 and Disk3. This can be done by mounting the
new CDs and using whatever means you find convenient to walk through
the directory tree. The images can be written on any
CD writer or computer, using any software that will support CD writing
from ISO images.
The mkisofs command may generate empty directories in the
root directory of the CD image itself. These are not a problem for the
installation contents. Just disregard them.
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