Last weekend I spent with installation (or upgrade) of my "testlab" computer. I'm using this computer for personal testing, learning and also for solving or looking for right answer to some questions posted on OTN Forums. I decided to install latest version of Fedora, SuSE, Centos (and also Solaris (x86)) because in some cases versions were pretty old (RedHat 9, FC2). Another reason for reinstall was that I wanted to make update of 9i installation papers according to user comments and suggestions that I received to my mailbox or according to questions posted on OTN forums especially in Linux and Installation section. Installation went fine and it was quick. I decided to create one storage for all Linuxes where I created database and config accessible from each of Linuxes, so I will be using the same database and the same parameters independent of booted Linux distribution. So my layout of storage is as following: /storage/config - location for parameter files and Oracle Net config files. /storage/oradata - mount point for database. Each instance has it's own directory of course (TEST9I, TEST10G). /storage/redo - optional location for redo (mount point for separate RAID). I'm using it just occasionaly. After installation of OS I booted one of Linuxes, and followed (exactly) all steps from my installation paper. Some caughts from installation: - LD_ASSUME_KERNEL is not important on new distros (FC5, SuSE 10.1). Actually setting this parameter to 2.4.x will cause another problems. - There is bug (probably) in Bash 3.1.x shipped with Fedora Core 5. This bug will occur during linking phase (there is splited bash command (using sed) in $ORACLE_HOME/bin/gennttab). I wasn't looking for official fix. Much quicker solution was to use older version of Bash. So I took src.rpm package from FC4 and builded it for FC5. After installation of 9i and 10g Oracle Databases I continued with installation of Oracle Application Server (10g 2 and 3 releases) and other 3rd party tools like rlwrap. During of installation I builded rpm of latest rlwrap version for each distribution. So in case of interest you can download it here: download rlwrap rpm for Fedora Core (md5 checksum: 862847544adaee89643832020d3375d5) download rlwrap rpm for Redhat, Centos, WBL (md5 checksum: de347425bc16bef54de28ab1514cca86) download rlwrap rpm for SuSE (md5 checksum: 738cbd8c702c8b2909ad85e2c4514460) In case you don't consider me (or my server) as trusted package source then you can build your own package using sources and spec file. To build a package you need to have rpm-build and readline-devel package installed on your system. For building process use following commands: 


su -
# cp rlwrap-0.24.spec /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/
# cp rlwrap-0.24.tar.gz /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/
# cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
# rpmbuild -bb rlwrap-0.24.spec
Builded package you can find in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/ (Note: For Redhat like distros the default target architecture is i386). Update rlwrap for Debian you can find here. and steps how to install rlwrap on MacOS X 10.4 you can find here. So this was my personal "Linux Installfest" (weekend). Of course all 9i papers were updated.