Installling Oracle9i & Oracle8i on same Host

Forgive me, Im sure that that this question has been asked and answered on numerous occasions here.

I'm working on a TEST Server [running Solaris9], and need to have Oracle8i & Oracle9i - installed alongside each other for testing.

I decided to design & partitioned this solution as follows:- I have Oracle8i installed where $ORACLE_HOME=/opt/oracle8/product/817 &
$ORACLE_BASE=/opt/oracle8

and an associated UNIX 'oracle8' $HOME account in /export/home/oracle8 (where uid=oracle8 gid=oinstall)

I have Oracle9i installed where
$ORACLE_HOME=/opt/oracle9/product/920 & $ORACLE_BASE=/opt/oracle9
and an associated UNIX 'oracle9' $HOME account in /export/home/oracle9 (where uid=oracle9 gid=oinstall)

First, I loaded the Oracle8i software & have since created a number of Databases - without incident..

However, when I now attempt to install the Oracle9i software from CD- as user 'oracle9', OUI errors prior to loading its opening GUI screen saying '...unable to write to file.... /opt/oracle8/oraInventory/oui.loc'

I suspect that this information pointing my Oracle9i installation to Oracle8's oraInventory - is being picked up from file /var/opt/oracle/oinst.loc - which is owned by 'oracle8'.

 I guess that I could remove this directory prior to staring my Oracle9i install, and my install may possibly work. However, my Oracle8i installation may well error after this.

I know that there must be a far neater way of implementing Oracle8i alongside Oracle9i - so what have I done wrong (?). Equally, is there a resource on the Web where question has been answered in detail (?) Received on Fri Oct 29 2004 - 18:05:33 CDT