Sunday, January 8

Oracle XE on Gentoo

Installing Oracle Express Edition on Gentoo Linux was both easy and hard. It's the usual case of synthesising bits and peices off the web: the system tweaking you have to do pre-install is well documented here; then you need a portage overlay, as documented here, and then you can use the ebuild from this thread to install it.


Once it's up and running getting emacs to talk to it is a peice of cake. You need to customise the oracle-sql program to point to the installed sqlplus binary, and you need to source oracle_env.sh from the config directory..then launch emacs and connect.


It took some work, but it's *much* better than using a bare sql plus instance and notepad in Windows. I can develop my SQL in a similar style to my Lisp, sending fragments to a running instance via C-c C-r, which is the absolute minimum I am coming to expect of any language.

1 comment:

cs weaver said...

Hi John, came across your blog and just wanted to say hello.

Write me some time and let me know how you are doing.

Kind regards,
Chris Weaver
(formerly with Bethesda Softworks and now teaching at MIT)
csweaver@mit.edu