While at Haydrian we began toying a bit with Oracle database. Using Ubuntu a debian package was needed but Oracle has it’s own out of control installer that’s gui based. I’m not an Oracle DBA, so this was a learning experience. I couldn’t find deb’s out there, so I wrote a build system to make one in a cheating way. This is in no form ready for public use, but it’s a great place to start if you want to put Oracle in a deb.

Grab the tar file here Basically you need to take a build box that’s clean and run the build.sh there. You’ll need to either have the oracle archive ready locally or on a server, see build.sh before you run it. It’ll check for dependencies and try to make an install, then package it up. It won’t pass a lintian check or anything at all. it doesn’t meet any LSB shit. It’s a mess. but it was working for us best as anyone could tell me.

the build shell runs a few python scripts that poke around that box and try to ensure it meets the requirements that oracle presents in the lengthy install document. It builds some trees, then runs the oracle installer headless in a preseed/unattended mode. Note that the install is big, a couple of gigs. You’ll need more than that because of the hacked up way I stuff it into a deb.

A former coworker said there is something better out there than when I last looked. Maybe he’ll comment and add it. Anyways, ask me any questions. I got permission to GPL all of this, so feel free to do something decent with it. There’ll be proprietary configurations in there (like the non-FSB directory trees). I figure at this point it’s best it’s just out there, as I don’t have the time or the desire to work with it.