Actually it only links: Oracle has a system user and this user (and its group, more precisely their UID/GID) is linked into the executable when the Oracle binaries are created. This is why you have to do a "relink" when you change that system user with

Code:

cd /$ORACLE_HOME/bin ; ./relink as_installed

You find the binaries under $ORACLE_HOME/install.

Notice that the relinking can cause troubles on some systems with memory constraints. You can patch the mentioned relink-script (its a simple shell-script) in this case. I can't remember what exactly i did ((IIRC it was something about temporary files, but i am not sure about what exactly) but i remember having to do that once and it was quite simple once i found the script itself.

@Neo: when the database (that is: the DB-files, not the DB-software, to be precise the database-instance) is created there are a lot of files copied (empty database files, redo-logs, catalogue files and what not) and i suppose this is what Marika is talking about - not the software (binaries) installation.

@Marika:
This is definitely wrong! It should be:

Code:

# Oracle Settings
export TMP=/tmp

I am not sure how Ubuntu does it, but might it be that /tmp is a "virtual filesystem" and in fact a part of RAM? If so: do yourself a favour, create a real filesystem on disk, mount that under /tmp and make sure it is big enough. Oracle creates some amount of temporary files and it might be that the space is simply too small or (if it is a virtual filesystem) its utilisation puts too much constraints on the RAM.

I hope this helps.

bakunin