Installing Oracle XE on Ubuntu

I've faced a dilemma today. I need an instance of Oracle XE datababase. The question however is "should I install the windows version on my box?". Since this is not the first time I've been doing it the answer was quite obvious: NEVER EVER DO THAT!

VMware Player to the rescue!

You might ask why wouldn't I install Oracle XE on my Windows box. The answer is plain and simple: I use my notebook for more than just data serving and allowing the Oracle to spread throughout the available resources would be a perfect waste of hardware.
So I did as follows: I've installed Ubuntu 9.04 server (very nice linux distribution indeed!!!), installed the necessary stuff I can't live without (openssh-server, tomcat6, mc, htop), used this tutorial to install Oracle XE, used this tutorial to configure web access to Oracle database manager for external hosts and that's it! It took an hour to get it to work from scratch and the time is really well spent!

One must not forget to allocate quite a lot of swap memory during installation. Automatic disk partitioning is out of the question here. I've created my swap partition to be 1.5 GB in size and that was enough to install Oracle XE.

The final product is 3.5 GB in size, has VMware Tools installed (taken from VMware Server) and performs extraordinary well! Long live virtualization!!!

See ya!