October 28, 2004: 10g installation on windows XP

Last week I got my new laptop. It runs windows XP quite smoothly, it has a wifi card and finally I have some free HDspace again. I'll wait for Suse 9.2 for serious business. But for now I am happy again :-)
After installation of some browsers, a decent editor and some other tools I decided to install the Oracle 10g database. I inserted the CD, fired up the installer, entered the registration key, accepted the default installation and left the pc for half an hour.
When I returned, the installation seemed somehow broken and the log showed some cryptic message about an EOF while reading an xml file. The software had been installed but the database was not running. Even worse, the installer was not able to provide me with an overview of all the installed features. Obviously something went wrong :-( so I decided for a reinstallation. I needed to manually remove the previous installation. What a pain that is on a windows machine, especially the registry part. In my opinion a Linux installation is much cleaner.
Today I did the installation again. I made a system restore point, just in case. Then I did a, more or less, custom installation and did not leave. That was obviously a wise decision since ZoneAlarm kept on asking me permissions for all kind of processes. I answered them all with yes. After half an hour it was all done. I can run OEM, (i)SQL, Toad (although it says that 10.1.0.2.0 not supported is, but I can connect). I am very impressed with oem. Now I have to find out how to start and stop the database, since I cannot find the dbstart and dbshut scripts. Next step is to install the companion cd with, among others, HTMLDB. Looking forward to another smooth installation.
For now I found only two issues: I cannot use opera for the oem, after a warning about browser support it fails. To be precise, it shows only the text 'Error java.lang.NullPointerException' in the browser's window, but iSQL works fine, *this is weird*. Fortunately Firefox works flawless. The other issue is that the ultrasearch url results in a connection refusal. I don't know what that means (or what ultrasearch does) but I may found out later.
To summarize. 10g on windows installs like a breeze, as long as you take care of the firewall. Although an installation on Suse 8.x (see a previous posting) also went quite well I am looking forward to running 10g on 9.2.
Posted by Aino at 22:13