How to install Oracle on OpenSuSe Linux

I recently upgraded my Linux installation to the latest OpenSuSe 11.2 release.

I decided to install the free version of Oracle (.e Oracle Express Edition or Oracle XE).

The installations seems to be relatively simple, but I ended up with a system which did not allow me to access the Home page of the administrative site.

After the configuration the system automatically starts the Net Listener and the Oracle database 10G Express. It prints a completion message that the Installation completed successfully and then suggests to access the database Home page by entering on your browser the command http://127.0.0.1:8080/apex.

I did as instructed, but the command was refused because it was unable to execute on the server.At the point I started panicking and I thought that I must have made some errors. I decided to uninstall Oracle by running the command rpm -e oracle-xe-univ and to do a new installation from scratch. Unfortunately the results were exactly the same.

Finally I wondered if the problem might be connected to the Web server. I decided to install Apache and to to install again Oracle. This time everything worked perfectly.

I found on various Linux Forums that many people seem to have this problem and I suggest them to try an installation of Apache before installing Oracle.

A more detailed description on how to install Oracle on Linux can be found on my Squidoo lens at oracle-installation-on-opensuse-linux