As part of my ongoing efforts to become more knowledgeable about the Oracle ERP ecosystem (and to have a testbed for my own investigations), I decided a while back to set up a small demo instance of Oracle eBusiness suite. Initially, I had planned to use Windows 2000 or XP as the OS, with the concomitant resources and software packs. However, I changed my mind, for several reasons:

• Oracle has a growing interest and investment in the Linux OS, as both a preferred commercial platform, and a development environment.
• Linux is cheap (practically free in initial capital), with fairly modest resource requirements, for a small test system. I stress this last, since I am not advocating my own setup as anything even close to appropriate for any type of production environment.
• Oracle EBS has recently been certified for use on Redhat, SUSE and Oracle’s own Linux offering. This makes it likely that (with some tweaking), it can be readily deployed against other stable, well-maintained and active distros (e.g., Ubuntu).

Getting Oracle EBS

Oracle eBusiness Suite is available from the Oracle® E-Delivery Web site (http://edelivery.oracle.com/). Be advised that downloading requires that you setup an Oracle Technet or Oracle.com account; you will also likely be contacted to validate you eligibility for use of the product in your environment. That being said, as long as you point out that this is being used to evaluate Oracle products as part of your ongoing Oracle asset management, there is not usually a lot of hassle from the Oracle reps. I found it simplest to download the zip files corresponding to the EBS setup discs onto my local client and extract them into a stage directory for later installation on the server over a network share.

Server Setup

With the above in mind, I repurposed one of my old servers, a 2.8 GHz AMD Athlon, jacking up the RAM to 2 GB, and sticking an extra 80 GB disk inside. My plan is to use the available tools, online and in my own bag of tricks, to get an EBS Vision instance up and running on the latest version of Ubuntu. Since my latest Ubuntu live CD is 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), the next step was to install to disk from the live CD, and upgrade to the latest and greatest Ubuntu (now at 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon). As much as possible, my plan is to follow the documented installation procedure for EBS/Linux, changing any steps where necessary to allow for the differences between Redhat and Ubuntu. As part of that process, I created two new user id’s for use in the Oracle product install process, oracle and apps.

In the next post, I’ll get into the details of the EBS install stage directory creation, and setup preparation.