Hi,
I installed RH 9.0 dual boot with WinXP. Now I want to install Oracle 9i AS.
I am not very well familiar with how file system is arranged in linux, I am still learning, but if I am not wrong, I proceeded with installing oracle in /opt directory
I have 2 harddisks in my PC, One for linux and one for XP. Now the XP one is partitioned say A and B. A is NTFS and B is FAT formatted by XP. Linux was installed with default partitions.
In opt I created a directory "oracle".
So the directory structure is /opt/oracle.
And mounted /opt/oracle to partition B by adding a line to /etc/fstab as below: dont know whether the syntax is correct or not, got this from some newsgroup and it worked.
/dev/hda2 /opt/oracle vfat auto,user,mask=0 0 0

Previously I used to get an error while mounting cdrom device, such as error on line 9 in /etc/fstab not in correct format (I cant remember the exact string of this error). But after going thru few newsgroup I fixed it by correcting the spacing in this line and then it was fine.

when I run "df" command I am able to see this mounted with space available. I did all this with root access.

Now for oracle I have to create a new user say "oracle" belonging to oinstall group. I log in as oracle, open a terminal window and type su to become root and create a new directory under /opt/oracle/oserver
As root now I try to change the owner of this directory chown -R oracle.oinstall /opt/oracle I get an error as below:
chown: changing ownership of '/opt/oracle': Operation not permitted
chown: changing ownership of '/opt/oracle/oserver': Operation not permitted

I am not able to change the ownership n hence it also does not allows me to create any directory under this folder.
Can any one tell me how to fix this thing.
Thanks in advance
Narinder

First general rule of installing Oracle... create the user and directory.

Make sure the /opt/oracle directory does not exist.
Log in as root and create a group called "oracle" and a user called "oracle". (You may want to create an "oraoper" and "oradba" groups as well).

# groupadd oracle
# useradd -c "Oracle User" -d /opt/oracle -m -g oracle -u oracle
# password oracle
Set the password for the oracle user.

Then log in as "oracle" (the user creation "-m" will make the oracle user the owner of the created /apps/oracle directory).

% /cdrom/runInstaller

The rest is up to you (though I've installed Oracle on three different Linux dists, and may end up putting HOW-TO type posts in the Member Success Stories forum).