GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Preliminary

Be sure that a bunch of Debian packages are installed:

  $ wajig install gcc make binutils libmotif3 lesstif2 rpm libaio libdb3

If you get a linking error while installing, you may need to install version 3 of gcc (thanks to Martin Schuster):

  $ wajig install gcc-3.3 g++-3.3 libstdc++5

Note that Oracle places its log file in /home/app/oracle/oraInventory/logs/.

The Oracle installation is for Red Hat so we need to make things look a little like Red Hat.

Create the following symlinks:

ln -s /usr/bin/awk /bin/awk
ln -s /usr/bin/rpm /bin/rpm
ln -s /usr/bin/basename /bin/basename # Suggested by Giuseppe Sacco
ln -s /etc /etc/rc.d                  # Required for root.sh

Pretend that we are running RedHat (the installer won't run otherwise) by adding the following to the file /etc/redhat-release:

Red Hat Linux release 4.1

Martin Schuster points out that the Installer absolutely needs swapspace, no matter how much RAM is installed.