Installing Oracle Client 10g on FreeBSD

[martinko]

Mike Friedman wrote:
> I'm running FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE and I want to run a current Oracle
> client-only with encryption support.
> 
> First, I installed the Oracle client port, which represents Oracle 7.
> But my database support person tells me that's quite old and, in fact,
> he couldn't be sure it would work (especially the encryption part) with
> the Oracle database I'd be using (which he helps support).  And I was
> getting some strange symptoms when I tested it.
> 
> So, he recommended that I download the Oracle 10g Client for Linux.
> Since my FreeBSD system is configured for Linux compatibility, I'm
> hoping this will work.  However, I can't even get the Installer to
> complete!  It keeps telling me that I may not have enough space in my
> root partition, even though I'm not trying to install into the root
> partition.  (The partition in which I'm installing has lots of space).
> 
> In addition, I should say that the machine on which this Oracle client
> will be installed is not running X Windows.  This means I can't use the
> installation menus, so I've been running the Installation tool with a
> 'response file'.  The response file, however, doesn't have much
> flexibility.  In particular, when I'm told I may not have enough space,
> it asks me if I want to continue, but there's no way for me to reply
> 'yes' from the response file.
> 
> In any case, based on the installation logs, it really looks like the
> Installation tool is looking at the root partition for how much space is
> available.
> 
> I've found in the FreeBSD handbook an article on installing Oracle 8.0.
> But it appears that there have been changes with 10g.  Also, those
> instructions seem to assume a server install, so they talk about setting
> some shared memory values and other things that may not apply to me anyway.
> 
> Do I have any other options?  I don't want to install the full Oracle
> package (client and server), just the client, so that I can write some
> perl scripts to query a remote Oracle database.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Mike
> 

Mike, have you considered linux-oracle-instantclient-* ports ?