Today, I was attempting to uninstall/upgrade Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g on a Solaris 8 Sparc server, and spent well over an hour trying to get the display exported properly to my MacBook Pro. First, the OSX X11 component doesn’t seem to play nicely with the Oracle ‘Universal’ Installer, so I booted up Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a Parallels Desktop and used ssh to export the display. Then, everything came up fine, but I couldn’t click any of ‘Next’, ‘Installed Products’, or even ‘Help’. It makes me wonder about the rest of Oracle when the installer buttons don’t work right, I mean that’s so hard to test and all…. Anyway, after searching the web the only recommendations I could find for this problem (going back at least 6 years) were:

  • Turn off your numlock key (no, seriously)
  • Try a different window manager
  • Type: export LANG=C at the shell prompt before launching runInstaller

After trying all of these, including booting into Ubuntu, nothing was working. Out of desperation, I booted into Knoppix, exported the display and everything worked the first try. Ubuntu and RHEL both use Gnome and Knoppix uses KDE, so I guess the ’try a different window manager’ is the solution. Die Oracle, Die. Hope this helps someone Googling out there.