We present a step-by-step guide to installing Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2.0.1) for Linux x86 (and x86_64, thanks to Thomas Stegbaur) on a Debian sid and etch installation. This guide has been developed over several versions of Oracle, and I aim to keep it up-to-date with the current version (and occasional notes regarding previous versions). Please let me know any issues or discrepancies you find.
Dani Dorbek reports that the install is also possible with 64bit Debian (AMD64). While installing 10g on Debian (amd64) you need to be aware that Debian 64bit is pure 64 bit (no 32 bit libraries exist). In particular, the runInstaller GUI won't work because the Oracle Java installer needs some 32 bit libraries to run.
Anthony DeRobertis provides (9 January 2008) the following basic outline for getting the graphical installed to work on AMD64:
mkdir /d32bit debootstrap --arch i386 etch /d32bit http://http.us.debian.org/debian Place /d32bit/lib and /d32bit/usr/lib into /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local-32bit.conf run ldconfig
An alternative, that Dani Dorbek proposed earlier, is that instead of running the GUI installer, we can try to use a response file and use
runInstaller -silent -responsefile
A sample response file supplied by Dani is available from http://togaware.redirectme.net/sampleOracle.rsp
Francisco Javier Loma Daza further points out that we need to use gcc-3.4 or gcc-multilib rather than gcc-3.3 to compile 32bit code (i.e., the -m32 option). With gcc-3.4 he had a linking error but it seems to go ok.
