Overall the installation is pretty smooth, just follow the instructions on Oracle website.
There are two minor hiccups though:
1. cannot touch `/var/lock/subsys/listener’: No such file or directory
This error is cause by the fact there is no /var/lock/subsys directory in some Linux distros, so you need to create one. Before you run “/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure” run
mkdir /var/lock/subsys
2. The second one is trickier. When you run the configuration wizard it fails while configuring the database and the log files contain something like
==> cloneDBCreation.log <==
alter system disable restricted session
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01034: ORACLE not available
Process ID: 0
Session ID: 0 Serial number: 0
This one is typically caused by listener not running (even though the previous line in the configuration log says it is running). Try this:
hostname
# this will display the hostname
ping
If that ping hangs (i.e. the host knows its own name, but can't ping itself) please go ahead and update the /etc/hosts file and add the hostname to the 127.0.0.1 entry. Restart the configuration and this time it will hopefully succeed.
