There is a reason Oracle is not certified on Debian.  It (Debian) is quite a bit different than the RedHat style linux's from which Oracle Linux is derived and for which Oracle DBMS is certified.  If this Debian machine is the only one you have, and this just for your personal use, I'd suggest you install VirtualBox, then create a VM running Oracle Linux and install on that.

I wrote several instructions in the past how to install Oracle Database on Ubuntu. Starting with version 11.10, several years ago, the differences between RHEL and Debian were simply becoming too extensive to bother. This isn't just about trying to figure out what software dependencies need to be installed, or what kernel parameters need to be configured, but also having to do with providing essential functionality, e.g. memory management, that is missing or incompatible between the two distributions. Things may have become somewhat easier with the release and support for RHEL 7, but still, why bother. You won't run Oracle Database on Debian in a production environment anyway, hence Virtualbox or VMware are the more reasonable alternatives instead of going through all the effort to figure out what's required to run Oracle Database on an unsupported distribution, not to mention Oracle GI/ASM, which is standard these days.

user11763611 wrote:

 

Thank you Ed,

Any chance you tell me what is the technical reason why Debian is not supported?

I am only using basic features of Oracle and I thought I could fake the installer somehow and avoid the visualization layer.

It worked with Oracle 18c so I thought it could also with 19c.

If VirtualBox is the only alternative then I will use that.

We have a bunch of VMware servers in the office with different versions of Oracle DB for our QA suite.

Maybe it's time for me to use these servers also for development, and have only Oracle Client on my laptop.

If it's a definitive "NO WAY to make it work directly on Debian", then it's a useful answer.

Seb

Dude pretty well summed it up.  I'd encourage you to install VirtualBox and create a vm using the same OS as your production databases.  I did that several (several!) years ago and while it seemed a bit of a struggle to get started, the process taught me a lot.  Both my office workstation (running Windows 10) and my personal laptop (running Ubuntu 16.04) have several VM's, each running Oracle Linux.  And I access those vm's with exactly the same tools as I use for my "live" servers in the data center.  That is, I do not use the machine console, but use putty (or some other ssh client) from the host machine.  Since I don't have direct console access to the machines in my data center, why would I depend on it for my vm's?

You can read more about setting up a vm under VBox, here.  There are actually three articles under that url.  One general article, one about the 'framework' I put together for my personal vm lab, and one devoted to networking considerations for the vm.

user11763611 wrote:

 

Ed, seems the link you provided is broken.

Seb

Sorry, try this: https://edstevensdba.wordpress.com/category/personal-test-systems/

user11763611 wrote:

 

Trying to install VirtualBox with apt, apt-get update gives:

 

...

Reading package lists... Done

W: The repository 'https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian stretch Release' does not have a Release file.

N: Data from such a repository can't be authenticated and is therefore potentially dangerous to use.

N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.

E: Failed to fetch https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/dists/stretch/contrib/binary-i386/Packages SSL: certificate subject name (download.oracle.com) does not match target host name 'download.virtualbox.org'

Questions about installing VBox are best asked here or here.

https://tecadmin.net/install-virtualbox-debian-9-stretch/