Simon Krenger

Recently I had to install SQL*Plus on a Linux host. In order to do so, I downloaded the appropriate Oracle Instant Client packages from the Oracle site. For my installation, I chose the ZIP files. After I unzipped the client and tried to run sqlplus, I go the following error:

simon@pandora instantclient_11_2$ ./sqlplus
./sqlplus: error while loading shared libraries: libsqlplus.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Hmm. When I checked the directory with the sqlplus binary, the file libsqlplus.so was clearly there.

During a silent Oracle 12c Release 1 database installation on a newly set up Oracle Enterprise Linux box, I encountered the following error when performing the installation:

[oracle@pandora database]$ ./runInstaller -silent -responseFile /home/oracle/database/response/kdb.rsp 
Starting Oracle Universal Installer...

Checking Temp space: must be greater than 500 MB.   Actual 45136 MB    Passed
Checking swap space: must be greater than 150 MB.   Actual 4031 MB    Passed
Preparing to launch Oracle Universal Installer from /tmp/OraInstall2013-06-27_12-11-01AM. Please wait ...
[oracle@pandora database]$ [FATAL] PRVF-0002 : Could not retrieve local nodename
A log of this session is currently saved as: [..]

But when I checked the hostname, everything seems to be just fine, I even get the FQDN:

After installing the Operating System (in my case usually Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Oracle Enterprise Linux) and configuring all necessary parameters, one has to install the Oracle software. It is usually a good idea to use a response file to do this.

There are a few reasons to use a response file:

There is always something that gets in the way. One problem I regularly stumble upon when installing a new Oracle 11g R2 installation is the following error when I try to start the database:

SQL> startup nomount;
ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

So I keep this post mainly for my own reference when installing a new database on a Linux system.

This error comes up because you tried to use the Automatic Memory Management (AMM) feature of Oracle 11g R2. Well done, but it seems that your shared memory filesystem (shmfs) is not big enough. So let’s look at the steps necessary to enlarge your shared memory filesystem to avoid the error above.

In this article, I will describe the steps necessary to install Oracle SQL*Plus on a Debian host. I am using Debian 6.0.5 and will install the “Instant Client” package from Oracle (version 11.2.0.3). First, we will prepare the system for the installation, download the installation package, set all the necessary variables, start SQL*Plus and connect to an instance. So let’s get started…

Before we begin the package installation, we need to make sure the necessary prerequisite packages are installed. Oracle Instant Client requires the libaio package, so let’s install that:

When setting up a new server in a highly secured network, one does not always have access to the Red Hat Network to download packages for the installation of the server. Often, a local repository is provided later on in the setup process.

This leaves us with the problem of installing the necessary packages for the Oracle database. Luckily, we can use the DVD we used for the installation of the Operating System to get all required packages.