This article will go through installing the Oracle 10g Express Edition. Please note that Express Edition is different from the Standard and Enterprise because it has its limits – data size is only limited to 4GB, memory is only up to 1GB, and it will run in only one processor. This means that even if you have 2 or more processors, it will only run on one, and even if you have more than 1GB of memory, it will only run as if you only have 1GB. Aside from that, everything is pretty much the same (feature-wise), so this is only good if you’re a beginner and plan to use this only to educate yourself.
Also, this article is for installing the said version on Ubuntu, version 9.04, to be exact. I’ll be using the .deb package made available here, so I won’t mention anything about installing from repo (sudo apt-get…).
That said, download the .deb file from the link. The file is approximately 200MB and the filename is oracle-xe_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb.
Once finished downloading, double click on it to install it. It’ll take a few minutes, and you won’t be asked for any configuration or whatsoever.
After successful installation, you’ll see a new menu item labeled Oracle Database 10g Express Edition with a bunch of other menu items. Don’t click them yet, and don’t get ahead of yourself. Even though you’ve successfully installed it doesn’t mean that it’s ready to go. You have to configure it first.
This won’t take long, don’t worry. Open a Terminal window and type
sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure
In there, you’ll be asked to provide the http port that will be used for Oracle Application Express, the port for the database listener, and the password for the user account SYS. Also, you’ll be asked whether you want Oracle XE to start on boot. Sorry, no screenshots, coz for some reason my brain forgot this little detail while I was ecstatic that I finally got it working.
From here, if all went well, you can now log on by going to the menu created earlier and clicking Go to Database Homepage.
It will open a browser window, whatever your default browser is, where that page will display. You can login by using the user account system, then typing the password you specified earlier in the configuration.
Speaking of browser, I had a little problem earlier, wherein even after successfully configuring it, the menus didn’t work, although I can still view the page by typing http://127.0.0.1:8080/apex in the address bar.
You see, the default browser in Ubuntu is Firefox 3.0. If you kept this even after installing the latest 3.5, you won’t have a problem running Oracle (viewing the webpage). In my case, I didn’t keep the previous Firefox installation when I installed 3.5, and I placed 3.5 in another location other than where it’s supposed to be (under /usr/bin). Since I uninstalled 3.0, there isn’t a default browser anymore.
To fix this, I simply edited the script files so that it points to where my Firefox 3.5 installation is. To do that, go to /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/config/scripts using Nautilus. You’ll see a bunch of files with .sh extensions.
Some of those files are the ones being invoked by the menu items. So, the menu Go to Database Home page calls the file DatabaseHomePage.sh, so on and so forth. To know which one is being called by which, right click on your menu bar and click Edit Menus. Browse to the Oracle menus, select one, and click Properties to see where it points to.
Now, even though you found them already, you won’t be able to edit them because, according to Nautilus, you don’t own them (oracle does). For you to edit them, you have to open them as root (sudo, anyone?). You can do that by browsing to that location using a Nautilus run as root (read how to do that here). Once you’ve done that, double click on the file and click Display (not Run).
Now that the file’s open, edit the part where it says /usr/bin. What this script does is look for the files firefox mozilla and konqueror inside /usr/bin. In my case, it won’t find anything coz I have neither of those three in there. What I did is change the /usr/bin to wherever my Firefox is – so if it’s inside /home/user, you should replace /usr/bin with /home/user. Change both instances of the words in the file.
And I bet you anything it’ll work now. 
