Oracle on Linux PoC - Start of a Journey ...

Our environment is mostly filled with Windows servers and AIX boxes. Recently there have been some shifts in thoughts for moving towards Linux. As a guy who has had prior experience working on Linux, I was pulled into setup the environment for the proof of concept.

Actual work on the site began last week with storage allocation and switch side configuration for the 2 IBM eServer x366 rack mountable servers. Two days ago I was located physically in our DR site (where the test boxes are hosted). After a little bit of tug-of-war I installed RHEL 6.1 on one of the boxes.

Getting the GUI part was tricky (I've not yet done it) during the installation. So I opted to take the 'linux text' method. Successfully completed a bare metal installation.

Groping to find an answer as to why the GUI was having hiccups I found that the model I was given to work with was not on the Red Hat HCL for 6.1. So waiting for our infrastructure guys to provide different set of boxes to work on.

Meanwhile I thought of playing around with the installation on my workstation, an XP box. Installed VMware server. And as I eagerly managed to get the VM remote console up to get the installation going, BANG!, I was having a 64-bit image and my box was 32-bit.

So now... downloading the 30-day evaluation of RHEL 6.1 32-bit.

(To be continued ...)