Bug 9676

I apologize for not having more information.  I don't know what the source
of the problem is.  I'm sending this in so you can be aware of difficulties
if someone else has the same problem.

We received a Dell system with RedHat 6.0 installed by Dell.  I upgraded
the system to 6.1 using a RedHat 6.1 CD.  The upgrade went well, but a
subsequent Oracle8i install did not.  We fought the problem for a couple of
weeks, verifying that all of the components needed by Oracle were in place
(including the proper JRE) and that the environment was set up right.  The
problem seemed to be with svrmgrl's ability to connect to the oracle
process.  We were running everything on the same machine, so a listener
wasn't required.  We installed one anyway, but that didn't help.  The basic
problem was that svrmgrl would not display a prompt.  It would hang and
could be killed only with kill -9.  sqlplus had the same problem when it
tried connecting with the oracle process.

We tried uninstalling all the Oracle8i packages and reinstalling Oracle8i
that didn't help.

Finally, in desperation, we installed (rather than upgraded) RedHat 6.1.
This partitioned the drives (we used the same number and sizes as before)
and formatted them.  We then installed almost all of the packages (leaving
out the news server and one or two others).  We set up the oracle user
account, the environment, and the JRE as described in the Oracle8i
instructions.  (We used the JRE tar file we'd prevously downloaded from
blackdown.org.  So that hadn't changed.)  The Oracle8i installation was
then flawless.  Absolutely no problems.

As a final note, we did NOT, at any time, modify the kernel as suggested in
the Oracle8i installation instructions.  Our machine is a 550 MHz Pentium
III with 256 MB of memory and about 20 GB of disk space, mostly empty.
The swap partition is 512 MB as I remember.  It was smaller before (200
MB, I think), but I doubt that's the problem.  There are no users on the
machine.  It runs the DB only (but it's a workstation install--with the
Gnome and KDE desktops).  It's running with only Linux on board--no
Win95/NT or other OS.