Installing TOra with Oracle support on Ubuntu 8.04LTS (Hardy Heron)
The situation is this. I am a system administrator working in a world of DBAs. This is not a bad thing, but sometimes tasks crossover and I need to connect to Oracle. In light of this, I have been using the Oracle SQL Developer GUI in KDE for some time now.
While the functionality of the product is quite slick I find it painful to work with. The major source of my pain is the slow interface due to its dependence on Java. I mean seriously, the screen refreshes are abysmal. I found that the more I used it, the more I needed a lighter, faster alternative.
One day a while back, I noticed that the boss was running TOra. He’s more of a DBA than I am, and I tend to trust his opinion on such things, so I asked him about it. He told me it was quite good, and so I decided I should try it out. I installed it on my Kubuntu desktop, fired it up, and much to my chagrin, found that it had no Oracle support. A bit of digging turned up that Oracle support was not included in the Debian package.
I had to do something about it. A bit more research brought me to some useful sites, a couple of which I will reference later, but after going through the process, I found that none of them had all the bits together in one nifty package. This is an attempt to change that.
After bouncing back and forth on some of these steps, fixing environment issues, decoding compiler errors, and generally fiddling, I went back to my notes and terminal histories and figured out what I feel is the best order for the process. This is the streamlined version of maybe two hours of fiddling. I hope it will help someone avoid the pitfalls (there are 8-bit crocodiles below!).
And so I humbly present to you . . .
