Installing the new Oracle 11g on OpenSolaris

I've already mentioned that Oracle 11g release 2 is now available for Solaris 10 on the X64 platform. I tried to install this release on the latest OpenSolaris development build (b127), it did initially fail but i found a quick workaround. This is of course not suitable to anything else than for pure testing and fun since it's currently only certified for Solaris 10 (Update 6 and later).

The helpful error massage from the installer was "Error in invoking target 'all_no_orcl' of makefile", but the log file shows what have gone wrong: "INFO: ld: fatal: library -lcrypto: not found"

The problem is that the OpenSSL libraries have moved out of /usr/sfw/lib in OpenSolaris, they are now located under /lib. The Oracle installer supplied the linker with the old location "-L/usr/sfw/lib/amd64" thous it failed.

A quick and very dirty fix to this is to provide a link to the library at the old location:

# ln -s /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so /usr/sfw/lib/amd64

Please drop a comment if there is a way of redirecting Oracle instead, but this was good enough for my little test.

After this I got the RDBMS up and running, including the web based Oracle Enterprise Manager if that's your thing.

As with Solaris 10 Oracle works fine inside zones, but in OpenSolaris zones are by default only a bare minimum of packages, therefore the following must be installed in the zone before Oracle:

# pkg install SUNWsprot SUNWmfrun SUNWuiu8 SUNWunzip SUNWbtool