Oracle 10g [Express Edition] supported on Ubuntu

[Derek Broughton]

Paul Sladen wrote:

> Ooooh, lookie what we have here:
> 
>   http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html
> 
>   "Available for Debian, Mandriva, Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu"

hmmm, I'm supposed to get notices about these, but I still haven't had one.

> Thanks to Sean Miller (an Ubuntu user) for the heads-up on that one, his
> comment was:
> 
>   "I also want to test Oracle XE, I've been programming Oracle 18 years
>   ...would like to see what this free version can do. I notice they quote
>   Ubuntu as a supported platform, which is a great testiment to what Mark
>   S etc. have achieved with this distro".

I've been using Oracle-XE for a month now, and it's really slick.  It's not
"Free", but it is "free" and the licensing restrictions aren't onerous. 
Note, it only permits 5 (iirc) concurrent users and 4GB of user databases,
but that's certainly enough for my development needs.  I've installed
Oracle 8i (with lots of hassles) and 10g (with some difficulty) on Debian &
Ubuntu systems, but XE was a simple apt-get away - answer a few simple
debconf questions and it's done.

I don't really think that supporting "Ubuntu" is a ringing endorsement. 
They promised during the beta test period that they would be providing
Debian packages (they never did until the production release), and they
just happen to work with Ubuntu, too (in fact, the version I downloaded the
first week of March probably _wouldn't_ have worked with Ubuntu, but they
provided their own copy of libaio).
-- 
derek