How to properly place that image on a USB memory stick, creating a USB installation media for Oracle Linux.

How to run a checksum hash on the downloaded image to make sure it was not corrupted during the download.

Choosing the correct image for installation.

That's the purpose of this article - a one-stop place to learn how to create a bootable USB memory stick to be used as the Oracle Linux installation media for 'real' hardware. Others had corrupted downloads or were attempting to burn a large ISO (Oracle Linux 8) on single layer DVD-ROM. Some were downloading the wrong ISO image. Over time I have noticed a growing trend of folks experiencing difficulties with installing recent versions of Oracle Linux on 'real' hardware. Many newer machines do not have an optical drive. But there are still folks that want to install Oracle Linux on 'real' hardware - an older server, laptop, or desktop machine. Large ISO images are not a problem for installing Oracle Linux in VirtualBox just mount up the ISO image and go. With Oracle Linux 8 - it's grown so large that efforts to contain it have been largely abandoned. While dual layer drives are now commonplace, the availability of dual layer media (and it's cost) kept it from becoming mainstream. It's been a struggle to keep the Oracle Linux 7 images within the 4.7GB boundaries of a single layer DVD image. Oracle Linux 8 Update 1 (current OL8 release) Oracle Linux 8 Update 0 (first OL8 release) Oracle Linux 7 Update 7 (current OL7 release) Oracle Linux 6 Update 10 (final OL6 release)

Oracle Linux 5 Update 2 (first DVD release) The first DVD writable DVD drives and media were Single Layer with a capacity of about 4.7GBīelow is a chart that shows how the x86_64 version of the ISO image has grown over the years: Eventually, dealing with multiple CDROM images became unwieldy and the DVD image became very common. Oracle Linux 3, 4, and early versions of 5 were distributed with multi-volume CDROM images. Early Linux distributions came on multiple 'floppy' disks! The first convenient common media was the CD-R with a capacity of about 650MB. Recent versions of Oracle Linux contain more packages than older ones.Īs Linux grew it became a challenge to contain the distribution within the boundaries of the commonly used media of the time. Recent versions of Linux are now 64-bit binaries only, and those binaries are bigger than their 32-bit predecessors.

Long gone are the days of installing Linux from floppies! As the OS has matured, it has grown up.

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