2 months ago I was able to install Oracle 10g on 2 different Intel based Linux servers running SuSE SLES 8 (powered by UnitedLinux 1.0). The Universal Installer ran without any problems and I was able to create several database instances that are still running today.

Earlier this week I tried to do the same install on a new server with the same hardware and software setup and encountered the following error:
-------------------------------------
./runInstaller

Starting Oracle Universal Installer...

Checking installer requirements...

Checking operating system version: must be redhat-2.1, UnitedLinux-1.0 or redhat-3

Passed

All installer requirements met.

Preparing to launch Oracle Universal Installer from /tmp/OraInstall2004-09-02_02-30-38PM. Please wait ...

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/sysman/oii/oiic/OiicInstaller
-------------------------------------

After several attempts to figure out what I was doing wrong, I decided to go back to one of the working servers and see if the oui would run. In both cases I got the same error message, even though I ran the exact same commands as I did 2 months ago.

Here are the environment variables I set and unset on the previously installed server:

unset ORACLE_SID
unset ORACLE_HOME
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH
unset CLASSPATH
unset SQLPATH
unset TNS_ADMIN

export PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
export ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
export ORACLE_TERM=vt100
export TMP=/tmp
export TEMP=/tmp

Anybody have any ideas on what could be going wrong?
The GUI never launches and it basically exits just a few seconds after verifying a supported OS.
I have tried both a CD-ROM install and a new download from the OTN, plus the original download from the OTN and they all give the same error.

Thanks, Bob

I'd check to see what DISPLAY is set to & that you can successfully launch xclock.

Good point.

I should have included that xclock is displaying fine and I'm basically doing things I have done many times before. Usually if I get an error it will be during the relinking phase and that is usually when I am trying to install on a non-certified OS and have to use a work-around and recompile something manually.

But this install is on a certified OS and actually worked fine 2 months ago, so I am quite stumped as to what has changed in our environment since I am now getting this error with 10g on 4 different SuSE Linux servers, 2 of which were successfully installed 2 months ago.

After 3 days of frustration, I found out what the problem was, but not how it was being caused. Fortunately, my description of the problem rang a bell with one of our sys admins and he knew a new flag that was being set that caused the problem.

The problem was that when jar files were being unzipped from the ../stage/Components/... area and written to /tmp/OraInstall2004-09-02_11-53-27AM/oui/jlib/OraInstaller.jar, the file name was getting forced to lowercase and ended up as orainstaller.jar instead of OraInstaller.jar. Since Linux is case sensitive, it was not able to find the file.

The cause of this behavior was the environment variable UNZIP being set to -L and all I had to do was unset UNZIP. Apparently this was not getting set 2 months ago, but is now.

All it took to find this was stepping through 30000 lines of strace output for both a working and non-working machine and the last 72 hours of my life. What made it harder is that strace was truncating the long filename paths, so I could not search on the jar file names.

Anyway, I just wanted to close this out in case someone came along and started looking at it.

Yell at your sysadmins!! As a sysadmin (amoung other hats) myself, I can safetly say that forcing all unzipped filenames to be lowercase on an OS that cares about case is just plain stupid.

I was wondering if you could help me.

My problem seems similar to yours.

I am trying to install 10g on Linux 9x, I have modified /etc/red_hat release to accept Linux9x. Here is the response after trying to run ./runInstaller as oracle user:

Checking operating system verison....

Passed

All installer requirements met

Preparing to lunch Oracle Universal Installer from /tmp/OraInstall*. Please wait.....error: invalid compressed data to inflate /tmp/OraInstall*/oui/lib/linux/libcinlntsh.so.9.0

Then the prompt:
$ Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/sysman/oii/oiic/Oiiinstaller

Here is the sample of my .bash_profile:
unmask 022
unset UNZIP

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib:/usr/X11R6/lib

ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/10.1.0/db_1
ORACLE_SID=orcl
PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH

export PATH LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export ORACLE_BASE ORACLE_HOME ORACLE_SID

Note that my xhost is working, any help will be appreciated.

It sounds like your installation media may be corrupt.

Did you download it from OTN and verify the checksums or are you installing from CDs?

The installer exec's a process to unzip files to the temp directory, but may not be processing the return code correctly, so when your unzip fails, it is still trying to access the file that was not successfully unzipped.

The java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError error seems to be the way that any missing files manifest themselves when something doesn't copy (or unzip) correctly during the install.

When you say Linux 9x, do you mean Red Hat Release 9?
I was able to get the installer to launch under Red Hat Release 9 using the same work around as you did, so I would bet on the corrupt installation source.

I downloaded the Oracle 10g from OTN, and my Linux is Red Hat Linux 9.

I would download it again and verify that the checksums and sizes are correct. I have Oracle 9.2 installed on my Red Hat 9 box and all I did was copy over the 10g files and the installer came up. I didn't complete the install, but it seems like you have set all the right parameters to where you should not be having this problem.

Good luck. I'm off to slip into Florida just as Hurricane Frances moves into Georgia/Alabama, so I won't be back for almost 3 weeks. Hopefully it continues to weaken and Orlando does not take another direct hit. Thankfully I got the 2 new instances up and running today, so the developers can play with them in the mean time.

Later.

I just did a sum on the downloaded zip file it reports 07925 597241. However,

oracle reported 306399691 for there file.