Three and half years have passed since my first attempts to install Oracle 10g on an unsupported Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Seeing that Oracle 11g is out, and exclusively for Linux at this time, I decided to download it among the first and see and share with you what it's installation looks like.

The distribution can be downloaded from the Oracle Database Software Downloads page, but let me warn you upfront that the archive is 1.7GB in size, so you'll need quite a big pipe to successfully download it. What makes it even harder is that Oracle insists that you download it from browser window (Wget and similar utilities won't work out of the box, although there are some tricks that can be deployed), so be prepared to have that browser window open for a long time and prey that download doesn't break along the way.

Is running Oracle10g on Debian Linux possible? Oh yes, definitely! And it runs great, really. It's even easier to install than the older versions of Oracle as there are no problems with incompatible libc library & other bugs. You need to make just two simple preparations before you can enjoy your new development database.