Automating Those Pesky Linux Prerequisites

Was just perusing Sergio Leunissen’s blog this morning and a couple of his recent posts caught my attention:

First off, as someone who frequently installs Oracle on Linux, his post last month about the recently released RPM oracle-validated was great – can’t believe I’d missed that. Basically it’s an RPM that makes sure you have all the required OS packages for the Oracle RDBMS and even sets kernel parameters and creates an oracle user and dba/oinstall groups. Sergio has a nice demo in his post; I’m going to have to start using this!

Secondly, Sergio linked to a great post from Wim back at the end of February about the differences between RedHat and OEL. The most important point: OEL is not a fork. In fact I didn’t realize this was available but there’s even a short PDF which lists every single package that’s different – and what the differences are. Have a look; it’s pretty much just logo and branding changes. In short, OEL is like Centos or White Box with real Oracle Corp support.

If you’re comparing OEL and RedHat there are really only two things to compare: (1) availability of OS for “proof of concept” or development systems – OEL lets you easily DL and run as many copies as you want for free like Centos and White Box while RedHat doesn’t and (2) support organizations – do you think that Red Hat or Oracle will do a better job of supporting your Linux operating system when you do decide to go into production and purchase support for it (and honestly that seems to be the bigger question in my mind).

Another thing to keep in mind is that Oracle will also support RedHat installations; you can even update your RedHat system to point to Oracle’s servers for new updates rather than RedHat’s servers. (Then for example you can automatically pick up packages like oracle-validated and ocfs.)