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I get the following error trying to install Oracle XE on a CentOS 5 virtual machine:

You have insufficient diskspace in the destination directory (/usr/lib/oracle) 
to install Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.  The installation requires at 
least 1.5 GB free on this disk.
error: %pre(oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386) scriptlet failed, exit status 1
error:   install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-1.0

This struck me as strange, considering that the VM is a brand new installation, using 3 GB of disk space out of 20. When I run free on the same box I get:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1035108     867780     167328          0      43408     604396
-/+ buffers/cache:     219976     815132
Swap:      2096472        120    2096352

Any ideas what could be wrong here?

Mark Henderson
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Peter Bratton
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  • Just a note: the "free" command you used will give you your system's memory use, and not disk space. For disk space use the "df" command, preferably "df -h" for human readable output – katriel Mar 27 '11 at 21:26

1 Answers1

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Turns out that the Easy Install feature of VMWare Fusion with CentOS is not so easy. By default, the installer creates two logical volumes: one under / and one under /home. It then allocates almost all disk space to the /home logical volume. In my case, I had 3.8 GB allocated under / and 13 GB allocated under /home.

This becomes a problem with large rpms that expect to be installed under / such as oracle's. By creating a new VM without the Easy Install checkbox, I was able to correct the problem. I didn't even need to change any defaults!

Peter Bratton
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