Easier installation of Oracle on Linux

This is more a note to myself... Installing Oracle on Linux has become much easier with a package that prepares the OS before installation of the Oracle Server software. In previous versions the rpm package used to be called oracle-validated, but for 11gR2 on OEL6 it is called oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall.

Probably the easiest way to install the Oracle database on Linux is to install Oracle Enterprise Linux 6 and before the installation of Oracle do two things:

1. Enable the public yum repository at Oracle:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-ol6.repo

Edit the file and enable the relevant version by setting enabled=1.

2. Install the package that prepares the server for Oracle database installation:

yum install oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall

No need to run any commands after the yum install command. Continue with runInstaller.

Update 2013-07-12:
With the release of database 12c Oracle has released a new package to prepare Oracle Linux 6 for it.

Get the info from Oracle here. The procedure remains the same as for 11g, only the name of the rpm file changes. I installed it on a fresh new OL6 without any extra configuration of yum repository with:

yum update
yum install oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall

The outline from Oracle tells you to do step 1 above, but the repo file was included in OL 6.4.