Oracle 10g XE and OpenVZ

Posted by Double Compile. Tuesday, May 6. 2008, 06:14 PM in Databases

Last night I tried to install Oracle 10g XE on my Debian-based database server for testing purposes. Tried is the key word here.

Interestingly enough, Oracle offers a deb repository for this purpose. Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

Then execute the following commands as root (or with sudo) to add Oracle's public signing key and then install Oracle XE:

# wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle  -O- | sudo apt-key add - 
# apt-get update
# apt-get install oracle-xe

Here's the catch: my database server is an OpenVZ VPS. The Oracle installer checks for a sufficiently large swap partition and will bomb out if one of a sufficient size is not found. OpenVZ VPSs do not have a swap partition.

OpenVZ does support swap space, and that swap space can be set with barriers and limits, but the swap space is as a whole meaning that there is one swap space for the entire system, not a user-configurable swap space per-VPS.

So now comes the task of tricking the installer to think I the VPS has a swap partition, or trying to get it on there some other way.  Stay tuned for the nuttiness.

Oracle is stupid.

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*I had exactly the same problem except I am installed xe into a centos vps. Any luck with your efforts?
#1 peter on 2008-07-16 01:36 (Reply)
*just put a fake free command un /usr/bin/free did the trick

root@oracle:/# cat /usr/bin/free
cat
#2 Nicolas Parpandet (Homepage) on 2008-09-16 06:07 (Reply)
*I faced the same problem, I finally found a solution. I just wrote an article explaining the solution here : http://jortega74.free.fr/serendipity/index.php?/archives/34-Oracle-XE-on-OpenVZ-the-SWAP-problem-resolved.html#extended
#3 Dun (Homepage) on 2008-10-16 04:57 (Reply)
*Hi, have you figured out how to install oracle XE in and openvz container?
#4 Xupeng (Homepage) on 2008-11-14 06:28 (Reply)

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