Installing Forms and Reports on a development system
- by Duncan Mills
By popular demand I've resurrected / updated one of the old blog postings from Jan Carlin's Blog on GroundSide here.
A recent (lengthy) post on the Forms forums chronicles the problems some of you have had installing F&R on a development machine. See the link in the headline of this post for the main one.
When installing, here are some points to bear in mind:
Download and install Weblogic Server first. http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/middleware/index.htmlFind the Forms and Reports (and Disco and Portal) zip files here. Download them to the desktop (or some other temporary directory of your choosing). Unzip both of the two zip files into the same new directory (maybe called 'stage') and check that you have 4 directories in the stage dir when you are finished unzipping: 'Disk1', 'Disk2', 'Disk3' and 'Disk4'. These folders are specified in the zip file structure and must be preserved for the setup executable to work.
If you use WinZip and have a right click menu option that say "Extract to here", use that by right click-dragging the zip file onto the newly created directory. Don't use the "Extract to folder %HOME%\Desktop\ofm_pfrd...disk_1of2" option. That will get you into the trouble that was reported early in this thread. Free up as much memory as you can. Stop services and background processes and virus scanners and databases (you don't need a DB to install Forms) and other things lurking about on your machine. You can restart them when the install is done. Around 1.5 GB free real memory should do it. If it doesn't, free up more if you can. Don't change the swap space unless you know what you are doing. Let Windows handle it. A 1 GB machine will likely not be enough. You will likely need at least 2GB of RAM.Start the install with setup.exe from the 'Disk1' directoryChoose the Install and Configure option unless you have a good reason not to.Choose a unique instance name even if you deinstalled and removed the last install. I suggest using 'asinst_20090722_1' (today's date in ISO format with a running incremented number at the end if you install more than two times on a particular day).Unselect Portal and Discoverer and select the Builders you want.Unselect WebCacheUnselect OHS.Unselect the single sign-on option Check for any failures and choose the retry option if any occur. If that doesn't fix the problem, call Oracle Customer Support .
