Common pitfalls installing Oracle XE 11 under Oracle Linux 6

First thing to check is the hostname inside /etc/hosts to ensure the install process can find the net listener. During the installation of Oracle Linux you set the hostname for example to oracle-vm.localdomain. Open with nano /etc/hosts and keep sure you have a line like this.

127.0.0.1 oracle-vm.localdomain localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4

Next thing is to keep sure you have shared memory configured. Enter df -k and see if a line starts with shmfs. If not then enter

mount -t tmpfs shmfs -o size=2048m /dev/shm

and change your fstab to have shared memory available after next boot:

shmfs /dev/shm tmpfs size=2048m 0 0

Oracle XE for Linux is only available for X64 systems. Enter uname -a and see if it ends with

x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

If not reinstall your system with the x64 version of your linux distribution.

Keep sure your system is up to date with yum update.

After Download of Oracle Database Express Edition 11g unzip the File to a folder. Install the rpm with

rpm -ivH Disk1/oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm

and enter

/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure

Check if the install process outputs ends with

Starting Oracle Net Listener…Done
Configuring database…Done
Starting Oracle Database 11g Express Edition instance…Done
Installation completed successfully.

or the log files under

/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/config/log.

On success you have a icon called “Get started with Oracle… .desktop”. Click on the icon and mark the link as trust worthy. It will open a browser

http://localhost:9000/apex/f?p=4950

If asked for a user name and password use SYSTEM and your chosen password as credentials.