Preparing to Install

System Requirements

Verify that your system fulfills the following minimum requirements. In general, having more resources in the system improves a system's performance.

Minimum of 2 logical CPUs up to 2048 logical CPUs
1.5 GB of memory per logical CPU, up to a maximum of 64 TB
At least 10 GB of disk space (20 GB is the recommended minimum)
On UEFI systems, ensure that the target disk uses GPT (GUID Partition Table), as some UEFI firmwares do not support UEFI/MBR boot

Refer to the following additional resources for information related to installation issues and system requirements:

https://linux.oracle.com/hardware-certifications
The Release Notes of the Oracle Linux version you are installing at General Oracle Linux documentation
Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel documentation

System Configuration

The configuration of the system itself also has an impact on the installation. Consider the following:

Storage

Storage device and partition on which the operating system is installed. The installation program displays a warning if disk space is insufficient.
Storage space for each file system (/, /boot, /home, /var/tmp, and so on), the file system type, and whether the block device underlying each file system should be encrypted.
Layout and configuration of the storage devices such as use of logical volume management RAID configuration, encryption, and others.
For iSCSI or FCoE connections, the WWID or the port, target, and LUN to be used.

Network

Required network setup using DHCP or static addresses, FQDN or host name, and so on.
Other specialized network interfaces to be configured during installation, such as VLANs and network bonding.

Software

URLs of any additional repositories and proxy settings to be installed.
Software packages to be installed based on system's intended purpose, such as a web server.

Obtaining Installation Images

To install Oracle Linux, download the installation images from the following locations:

Oracle Software Delivery Cloud at https://edelivery.oracle.com.
Oracle Linux yum server at https://yum.oracle.com/oracle-linux-isos.html.
Note, however, that the Oracle Linux yum server does not provide equivalent repositories for some channels that are available on Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). These channels provide non-open source packages. For more information about ULN, see Oracle Linux: Managing Software on Oracle Linux.

The following installation images are available for both the x86_64 platform and the aarch64 platform, unless indicated otherwise:

Full ISO of Oracle Linux for typical installations on systems that are located locally or remotely.
Boot ISO of Oracle Linux for network installations or if the installation media lacks space to store the full ISO.
Boot ISO of the supported UEK release for installations in which you want to use the Btrfs file system or for installing on hardware that is supported only on UEK.
For instructions to install Oracle Linux with the Btrfs files system, see Installing a System With a Btrfs root File System.
Source DVDs that contain the source code for the software packages in the release.

Aside from installation ISOs, you can also use Oracle Linux images to create compute instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). For information about these images, see the release notes for the specific image that you are using on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation page at https://docs.oracle.com/iaas/images/. For information about using Oracle Linux instances, https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/oracle-linux/home.htm.

For information about the available ISOs for the three most recent updates to the Oracle Linux releases, refer to https://yum.oracle.com/oracle-linux-isos.html.

Preparing Installation Media

Before you can use an ISO image to install Oracle Linux, you must first store it in a bootable installation media, such as the following:

USB Flash Drive

You can install Oracle Linux by using a boot image on portable devices such as a USB flash drive or an SD card, provided that the system's firmware supports booting from those devices.

To create a bootable drive, use the dd command. Or, use a separate third-party utility to write the ISO image to a drive. See, for example, Create USB Installation Media for Oracle Linux with Fedora Media Writer.

Caution:

This procedure destroys any existing data on the drive. Ensure that you specify the correct device name for the USB drive on your system.

Insert a USB flash drive into an Oracle Linux system.

Check the file systems that are on the drive.

sudo df /media/usb

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1                35346     35346         0 100% /media/USB

Unmount the file system.
```
sudo umount /dev/sdb1
```
Write the contents of the ISO image file to the USB device, for example:
```
sudo dd if=./full_image.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=512k
```

The USB flash drive is now ready to be used to boot a system and start the installation.

DVD or CD

Due to storage limits, CDs or DVDs might no longer be sufficient to accommodate ISO images. Or, they can store only the boot ISO image.

To write the downloaded ISO image file to a CD or DVD, use a command such as cdrecord, for example:

sudo cdrecord -v -eject speed=16 dev=ATA:0,2,0 file_name.iso

To display the SCSI subsystem and device that corresponds to the CD or DVD writer, use the cdrecord -scanbus command.

Network Drive

For the network drive, the image that you download can either be the full ISO image or just the boot image, while the network server can be of any type, such as NFS or a web server.

To copy the ISO image to a network drive, first mount the image and then use the following command syntax:

sudo cp -a -T path-to-mounted-ISO-image network_dir

For example, if you are using a web server to host the network drive, and have mounted the ISO image on the server’s /mnt location, you could run the following command:

sudo cp -a -T /mnt /var/www/html/OSimage/OL8

When the command completes, you can boot the system from the network drive.

Note:

Using a network drive is part of network installation, which requires you to build a network configuration that provides network installation functionality. For details, see Creating a Network Installation Setup.

Driver Update Disk

A Driver Update Disk (DUD) provides a mechanism for delivering updated device drivers during system installation. On some systems, hardware might not be fully supported for an Oracle Linux release. In these cases, a DUD may be released at a later date to facilitate installation on newer hardware.

DUDs are released as modules and become available for previously unsupported hardware. The DUD is usually in the form of an ISO and is available in the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud or through MyOracle Support.

Like the other ISOs, the DUD must be stored in an appropriate media or an alternative storage device before it can be used to for installation.

Attention:

Writing the DUD ISO to the wrong device may result in data loss. Check that you reference the correct device node when you copy the image. Use the lsblk utility to help you to identify the different disks block devices on your system.

To use the driver update disk, issue the dd command line utility to transfer the DUD image to a separate storage device:

sudo dd if=/path/to/DUD.iso of=/dev/sdX

/path/to/DUD.iso refers to the full path to the location of the DUD ISO file.
/dev/sdX refers to the device node of the storage media that you intend to use for the DUD.

As an alternative, you can transfer the DUD image to a location that is accessible over the network such as a web server or an NFS server.