This is just a list of the problems I encountered when trying to install Oracle 9iR2 on Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (Woody), and the solutions I found for them. This work was carried out while working on Radius Topology for my employers, Laser-Scan.
Most of the problems I experienced with installing 9iR2 were associated with running dbca, the Database Configuration Assistant, and with creating a database.
oracle@lslp7e:~$ dbca SIGSEGV 11* segmentation violation
Joy. This problem is associated with not having the correct locales installed for glibc. I ran dpkg-reconfigure locales and selected all the en_* locales to be installed, as well as selecting C as the system default locale. Make sure the DISPLAY environment variable is correctly set, and dbca should now run.
On the first machine I installed Oracle on (a slowish Pentium II), I was using a 2.2.19 kernel, and I didn't experience this problem. On the second machine, a 1.2GHz Celeron from Dell, CREATE DATABASE would always fail with:
ORA-03113 end-of-file on communication channel
Delving deeper, we see an ORA-07445 in the alert log:
ORA-07445: exception encountered: core dump [sxorchk()+69] [SIGILL] [unknown code] [0x0] [] []
This was fixed quite simply by upgrading to a 2.4.18 kernel.