Install Oracle 23c Developer Edition in Oracle Linux 8 VM

The Oracle 23c Developer Release is available as a complete, ready-to-run VM with a complete set of tools. But if you want, for whatever reason, build your own VM, you might want to follow this guide.

Start with a fresh Oracle Linux 8.7 VM like the one from The Oracle DB Developers VM project and run a sudo dnf upgrade to make sure to be on the latest patches. Avoid using Red Hat's historic kernels and boot with the latest kernel provided by Oracle.

Download the rpm and follow the installation guide from Oracle. My OL installation only found the preinstallation packages for 19c and 21c, but not for 23c. So I followed the guide for Red Hat Linux, which worked.

sudo -s

curl -L -o oracle-database-preinstall-23c-1.0-0.5.el8.x86_64.rpm https://yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL8/developer/x86_64/getPackage/oracle-database-preinstall-23c-1.0-0.5.el8.x86_64.rpm
dnf -y localinstall oracle-database-preinstall-23c-1.0-0.5.el8.x86_64.rpm

dnf -y localinstall /home/oracle/ddrive/Install/Linux-x64/oracle-database-free-23c-1.0-1.el8.x86_64.rpm
/etc/init.d/oracle-free-23c configure

When the installer is done, follow the installation guide and set the variables in .bashrc and source it:

export ORACLE_SID=FREE
export ORAENV_ASK=NO
. /opt/oracle/product/23c/dbhomeFree/bin/oraenv
export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH

Take a first look at the DB, it is ready to run now.

Download the latest SQLcl and unzip it to your favorite tools location like

wget https://download.oracle.com/otn_software/java/sqldeveloper/sqlcl-latest.zip
unzip sqlcl-latest.zip -d ~/bin

Add SQLcl to your PATH and also add a TNS_ADMIN variable to your .bashrc and source it.

export PATH=/home/oracle/sqlcl/bin:$PATH
export SQLPATH=~/sql

Make some settings for SQLcl for a nicer experience 

mkdir ~/sql
cat >> ~/sql/login.sql <<EOF
set statusbar on
set highlighting on
EOF

Now we have SQLcl:

Download SQLDeveloper from https://www.oracle.com/database/sqldeveloper/technologies/download/
I prefer the Other Platforms version. Unzip it to its destination.

unzip ~/ddrive/Install/Generic/sqldeveloper-23.1.0.097.1607-no-jre.zip -d ~/bin

Look here on how to add SQLDeveloper to the Gnome menu. Run SQLDeveloper, it will tell you if you need to adjust the JDK location at startup.

Create a connection

Follow this guide on how to install VSCodium and the Oracle Developer Tools for VSCode. Create a new Database connection in VSCodium to freepdb1.

So far, this is quite a complete environment to start with Oracle 23c Developers Edition.