Hi,

After struggeling for quite a while trying to get Oracle 9i running on
Debian properly, I copped out and went the easy route. Since I wasen't
ready to move from Debian to Suse just for a test/play oracle
installation, I took the middle road. If anyone is interested, here is
what I did to get Oracle working on Debian.

1. Make a seperate /usr/local partition
2. Make a new partition for suse install
3. Install suse 7.2 from the net (base + X)
4. Mount /usr/local on suse
5. Install oracle 9i on suse 7.2 with /usr/local/<whatever> as
ORACLE_BASE (This goes without hitch -- hopefully)
6. Install the suse oracle package
5. Test if oracle works "/etc/init.d/oracle start" (Yes it does --
hopefully)
6. Reboot to Debian
7. mount /usr/local on Debian
8. mount suse partition
9. chroot to suse partition
10. mount /usr/local on chrooted env
11. mount /proc
12. start oracle with "/etc/init.d/oracle start"
13. Thats it!!

Interestingly, oracle runs from the chrooted env, but not directly
from Debian. This is probably because oracle has a glibc 2.2.2
dependency and I have a glibc 2.2.4 installation on my Debian system.

cheers,

-- Anant