I'm way-new to both Linux and Oracle.

Following instructions in the "Oracle 8i for Linux Starter Kit" book,
I think I created groups/oracle user ok and set environment variables in .bash_profile correctly (DISPLAY=localhost:0.0; export DISPLAY), but when I mount Oracle 8i cdrom, cd /mnt/cdrom and ./runInstaller from a shell xterm-launched from KDE, I see the following message:

"Initializing Java Virtual Machine from ../stage/Components/oracle.swd.jre/1.1.8/1/DataFiles/Expanded/linuxbin/jre. Please wait..."

Then nothing happens. Has anyone been down this road that might have an idea what's going wrong?

apparently, other people have had this same problem with the oracle installation. this link has a few fixes on the jre errors -

http://www.thomasfly.com/Oranux/

if you have any other problems, let us know