Running Oracle on PPC Mac (10.5.8)

Installing Oracle 10g R1 on PPC Macs running Leopard

Oracle has a version of the RDBMS for both Intel and PPC Macs, but unfortunately for PPC users, their version is only supported on Tiger (10.4.x) and not Leopard.

This tutorial will show you how to install the 10gR1 RDBMS on PPC Leopard (10.5).

Sadly, this will most likely be the last version of Oracle on PPC Macs, as both Oracle and Apple seem to have abandoned this platform.

1. Grab Xcode 3.2 from and install. This will give you the most recent version of gcc (4.2), which is required for the relinking.

2. On the same site, click Developer Tools then grab Xcode Legacy Tools (with gcc-2.9.5) . This contains a required library that is missing from the newer version.

3. Download Pacifist from . This is a utility that lets you view the contents of Mac *.pkg archive files.

4. Using Pacifist, open the Xcode Legacy Tools archive, and look for a library called libcc_dynamic.a. Extract this file into the /usr/lib directory as the root user.

5. at this point. You are ready to install oracle. Grab the 10.1.3 Install DMG, follow the install guide. The install should finish without problems. If you get any link errors, just hit ignore as you will need to relink everything in the next step.

6. Once the install is done, you still will not be able to start the instance because of some cross reference errors. You will need to relink all executables. To fix this, open a Terminal shell as the oracle user:

$ cd $ORACLE_HOME/lib

$ mv libnnz10.dylib libnnz10.dylib.backup

$ relink all

$ mv libnnz10.dylib.back libnnz10.dylib

7. At this point you should be all set. You should be able to start the instance. We were not able to get dbca running, but were able to create a database manually.