Installing Database 19c on Oracle Linux 8

Database release 19.7 (ie, 19c with the April 2020 RU) is at last certified for OL8, but there may be some hacking needed to get it installed.

This certification is long overdue: our security admin has been pushing for the 5.x kernel for some time, and OL7 still only supports kernel 4.x. I’m starting to move some production systems over now using the July RUR, which takes the release to 19.7.1.

Begin by installing the Oracle Validated rpm from the ol8_UEKR6 repository:

yum install oracle-database-preinstall-19c

That is supposed to sort out everything, but there are still two hassles.

First, the installer will refuse to run because it doesn’t recognize the operating system. There is no switch on runInstaller that I can find to avoid this, but there is an easy workaround:

export CV_ASSUME_DISTID=OL7

then it will proceed.
Second, it will throw a warning about a missing rpm, compat-libcap1-1.10, which you can of course ignore but it is nice to have an install run cleanly. The problem seems to be that this package is missing from the OL8 repos. No problem – you can grap it from a Linux 7 repo:

wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/compat-libcap1-1.10-7.el7.x86_64.rpm
yum localinstall compat-libcap1-1.10-7.el7.x86_64.rpm

and now the install goes through with no warnings, and you can proceed to apply the latest RUR (or RU, if you are feeling brave).
Hope this helps someone.

—
John Watson
Oracle Certified Master DBA

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