I have just been with a customer who was using Oracle Enterprise Linux 5. Now this shouldn’t be any different from other Linux installations except for one minor problem, the SOA Suite installer insists on checking that the Linux flavor is one explicitly supported by SOA Suite. Well OEL wasn’t in the list when SOA Suite 10.1.3.1 came out and so the installer fails on the pre-requisite checks and won’t go any further, even if you applied all the required patches to the OS. Fortunately there is a patch 6339508 which provides replacement pre-requisite tests. To use it you need to add two parameters to the runInstaller command as shown below.
./runInstaller PREREQ_CONFIG_LOCATION=<PATCH_LOC>/prereq –paramFile <PATCH_LOC>/oraparam.ini
PATCH_LOC is the location where you unzipped the 6339508 patch. With these new parameters the installer correctly recognizes Oracle Enterprise Linux as a supported platform. Note that OEL needs some specific patches when used with SOA Suite and these need to be installed prior to running the installer. Check the documentation for details.
I am seeing an increasing number of customers taking up OEL, I think because of the attraction of a single company supporting the whole technology infrastructure stack, OS, AS and DB. I expect to see more of this still in the future.
