Many moons ago I was running Oracle 8i on RH6.2

After an interruption of more than a few years I want to pick up where I left off and create a linux environment, running apache to host a web-site with an Oracle back-end.

Much of my motivation is to create a live environment to learn Oracle and linux for future certification (and a college capstone project).

I believe I should abandon RH6.2/8i as obsolete and upgrade to 9i - but what linux distribution should I use?

Any suggestions?

Maybe this sounds a bit harsh (I assure you it isn't) but let's turn that around and ask what distro's Oracle indicates it is "supported" or "certified to work reliably" on? Any qualitatively "good" reason why it would be that way? And would it be practical, from a production environment point of view (support, compatibility, liability, etc, etc), to assert companies would do otherwise?

I'd use either Fedora Core 5, or Suse 10. Oracle has come a ways since 9i. Their latest is 10g release 2. I got it set up under Mandriva 10, but was a bit more difficult then should have been. (had to compile an rpm from source after a couple hours of research). You can actually download it for test from Oracle. You may want to actually use their Lite version, which is free to use even in production.

When setting up Oracle, their recommendeKubuntu is basically the same as ubuntud setup is a /u01 and a /u02 partition. The u01 is for oracle the application and u02 is for oracle's data. Once you follow oracle's recommended setup (including server system level tweaks), it has a pretty decent java installer.

Cheers and good luck,
Pete