$ grep SwapTotal /proc/meminfo

Anything more than 1,000,000 kB (i.e., about 1GB) is good. If you have less, make your swap partition bigger or else add some more swap with something like:

  # dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=1024
  # mkswap swapfile
  # swapon swapfile

See Chapter 90 for further details on swap. Next:

  $ df -k .

Anything greater than 400,000 kB available is good. Next:

df -k /

Anything above 4,000,000 kB available is good. If you have less, delete some files, grow your root partition, buy a new hard drive, or install to a different partition (which means deviating from this guide.) Next:

wajig install gcc make binutils libmotif3 lesstif2 rpm

Now, we need to create a dedicated user and two groups to install. For example, use oracle, oinstall, and dba for the user and the two groups respectively (deviating from these is not recommended.) Check whether they already exist or not:

grep oinstall /etc/group grep dba /etc/group grep nobody /etc/group id oracle id nobody

If any of them don't exist, create them:

/usr/sbin/groupadd oinstall
/usr/sbin/groupadd dba
/usr/sbin/groupadd nobody
/usr/sbin/useradd -g oinstall -G dba -p passwd -d /home/oracle oracle
/usr/sbin/useradd -g nobody nobody

Next, we need to create some directories and set permissions.

mkdir -p /u01/app/oracle mkdir -p /u02/oradata chown -R oracle:oinstall /u01 /u02 chmod -R 775 /u01 /u02

Next, we need to check some kernel parameters. Run the following commands, check the output, and make the changes as required.

/sbin/sysctl -a | grep sem /sbin/sysctl -a | grep shm /sbin/sysctl -a | grep file-max /sbin/sysctl -a | grep ip_local_port_range

Output:

kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128

kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648

fs.file-max = 65536

net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000

If you need to change any of the values, open up /etc/sysctl.conf in your favourite text editor (read: emacs) and change the appropriate entries as follows:

kernel.shmall = 2097152 kernel.shmmax = 2147483648 kernel.shmmni = 4096 kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128 fs.file-max = 65536 net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000

Run /sbin/sysctl -p to apply the changes (only if you changed something of course.)

Add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf file:

* soft nproc 2047 * hard nproc 16384 * soft nofile 1024 * hard nofile 65536

Add the following line to the /etc/pam.d/login file, if it does not already exist:

session    required     /lib/security/pam_limits.so

Because we are using the Bash shell add the following lines to the /etc/profile file:

if [ $USER = "oracle" ]; then if [ $SHELL = "/bin/ksh" ]; then ulimit -p 16384 ulimit -n 65536 else ulimit -u 16384 -n 65536 fi fi

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

Pretend that we are running RedHat (the installer won't run otherwise):

cat > /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Linux release 2.1 (drupal) ^D

Log in as user oracle

su oracle

Add the following line to the end of /.bash_profile

umask 022

Set/unset some environment variables:

ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
ORACLE_SID=test
export ORACLE_BASE ORACLE_SID
unset ORACLE_HOME
unset TNS_ADMIN