Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition on Linux White box - AMD 64 (x86_64)

I had difficulty installing Oracle 10g express edition server on 64 bit White box linux earlier. So I had installed it on my WIndows XP box to use it with my RoR application.

Today my windows box crashed and I hunkered down and figured out how to install Oracle on my linux box. There are a couple of tricky steps that could trip you up. I am documenting the steps here hoping it will help someone out.

1. Download Oracle 10g Express Edition rpm from the Oracle website - oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm (221136869 bytes)
2. ** Don't use sudo to install the rpm. Log in as root and then run
   rpm -Uvh oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm
   Otherwise you will get the following error when you try to run sqlplus to connect to the db.
   

   ORA-01034: ORACLE not available
   ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist
   Linux Error: 2: No such file or directory
   

   
   Also, the web server component of the Oracle server never starts if you use sudo to install the rpm.
   
3. Run configure to configure the server.
   
4. ** If you get
   

   oracleXE: error while loading shared libraries: libaio.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
   

   then you need to install the 32 bit version of libaio library
   

   sudo rpm -Uvh http://fedora.osmirror.nl/core/development/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/libaio-0.3.106-2.2.i386.rpm
   

5. Source the env before you run sqlplus
   

   source /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin/oracle_env.csh

6. Look in /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/network/log/listener.log if the listener or the web server (127.0.0.1:8080/apex) doesn't start. It may contain possible reasons.
   
7. Since the web server is bound to 127.0.0.1, to connect to the oracle web server from a remote machine, you will need to use putty (or similar) to create a ssh tunnel.