Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is here... and Oracle?

And I'm somewhat disappointed.

Install woes

I tried installing on a separate disk, a 300GiB Samsung 321KJ.
The first installation attempt failed in the cleaning up phase, at 89%.
The second attempt failed with a read error, and the advice to clean my CD lens or move to a colder area.
Fourth attempt, after checking the installation CD for errors: ditto.
Fifth attempt, other disk (same brand, model and age): ditto.

Most annoying is the lack of feedback on the install proces, and even CTRL-[Funtion keys 1-4] will not display a text box with your error (or standard) output.

Alas...and an alternative install

Gave up on installing 10.04 off a CD. Installed 9.10 (which took about 30 minutes, and went OK), logged on, and allowed the system to update to 10.04 LTS. That took about one-and-a-half hour. Configuring NOT to play that hideous sound on startup, use colors I do NOT dislike, install Thunderbird and VirtualBox and remove IM, Chat and Evolution: another 5 minutes.

Oracle on Ubuntu

I gave up. I did not even try to install any Oracle product on 10.04. Oh, they probably will run, with some tweaking and stuff; after all I managed to get 10G database and Application Server running on 9.10.

But Oracle usually runs on stable versions; once released it looks like it's already falling behind. Therefor I abandoned the idea running Oracle directly under Ubuntu, but use CentOS/RHES instead in virtual machine environments. Ubuntu simply is too much "cuttin' edge" to my liking.
So - now I have a CentOS 5.4 basic Server install with XWindows and that's about it.

Installing CentOS 5.4

I used a net based install. CentOS 5.4 supports FTP and HTTP based installations using a special, only 8.9MB (yup - MegaByte!) bootable install ISO. I discarded about all options, apart from the Server install (no GUI) and XWindows (OUI needs XWindows, although using Ubuntu as Xserver would be possible, too).
Choose a non-expanding virtual disk, as the database and expanding volumes do not mix-and-match. 32GB should do the trick.

Clone your Box

Unfortunately, there's no 'Duplicate' option in VB, so you'll have to do it by hand, which is surprisingly simple: run Export Appliance, followed by Import Applicance. Change the name of the Virtual machine, so you won't end up with two machines with the same name.

Meet db10 - my 10GRel2 database server

Fire it (the cloned machine, not the baseline!) up, change ip-address (/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, I used 192.168.1.230) and hostname (/etc/hosts, /etc/sysconfig/network, sysctl kernel.hostname=db10) and Bob's your uncle.