Part 3. Installing Gnome for Oracle Solaris 11.1 (x86/64-bit) - Turings Man: from data center through IT to hobbies, general thoughts and reflections, altogether.

Part 3. Installing Gnome for Oracle Solaris 11.1 (x86/64-bit) - Turings Man: from data center through IT to hobbies, general thoughts and reflections, altogether.


Now, as we have basic Oracle Solaris 11.1 installed on our virtual machine, we will need to have a graphical desktop environment installed, too. It's required by the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) application we will use to install Oracle Database 11gR2.

We don't want to complicate the things too much at this time, therefore we will launch OUI locally. In typical scenario one can want to run X server on his local desktop computer, export appropriate display settings from the target server (on which, usually, an administrator is logging in via SSH2 remotely) and perform the installation via OUI, including database creation via DBCA (Database Creation Assistant). We will simplify the whole process – all in all we are working with virtual machine and we can launch graphical session there. Although, we have to install Gnome first. Let's do it.

Login using your user account and then switch to root role (you can skip "uname -a" command, of course):

Then type the following command:

# pkg install slim_install

You'll see the installation process, as shown on the following screenshots:

Wait until the end and execute:

# startx

You'll see the well-known Gnome desktop:

Now, let's reboot our system (System –> Shut down... –> Restart) – after a short while we should be able to see GDM (Gnome Display Manager) login:

That's all. We can now begin prerequisites configuration for Oracle Database 11gR2 installation.