Oracle on Ubuntu

The company I work for has supplied me with a very decent laptop, in December 2007, equipped with an Intel Core Duo T7500 processor, 4GB of RAM, and an 160GB Harddisk. The only downside (and reason I hardly ever use the thing) is Vista Enterpise. Apart from the fact Oracle only recently certified versions for Vista, it takes forever to get it into a state I can actually do some work. I timed it once, and it took 5 minutes for Vista to get into a working state (showing off a picture is not what I regard "working state"), including getting an IP-address from my local NAS, setting up an VPN session to the internal network and firing up my email application.
As a comparison, Ubuntu does the same (without the VPN), in about a minute.

Why all this?
Well, it basically explains why I installed Ubuntu next to Vista (dual boot configuration); I really got fed up with the abysmal performance of Vista. And no, it will probably not be all Vista's fault (our IT department uses images with a lot of stuff starting up), but an OS reporting 3GB where there's really 4GB installed - well, that's 33% gain by installing an OS that actually uses that last GB!

CentOS
Installing Ubuntu (Desktop) was easy; CentOS, the platform of choice for me as Oracle gets onto Linux, failed miserably in recognizing the graphics driver - even the text based install got stuck.
Did not spent much time on the issue, don't think much of it. It's a laptop, not server hardware!

RDBMS: 10G Rel2
I think 11G can be installed on Ubuntu without too much of an effort, but this side of the ocean, not many clients have 11G, or plans for that matter. So, for now, I'll stick to 10G Rel 2 - Enterprise, of course...

iAS: 10G Rel 3, patch 4
Or Version 10.1.3.4, for that matter. The SOA Suite Edition - get that running, and you can get anything to run.