How things used to work...

Oracle Collaboration Suite provides a calendar program with clients for various platforms including linux. Under older releases (e.g. Debian Etch), the Oracle-provided installer works fine. The normal sequence for installing the calendar is:

 # aptitude install sun-java6-jre libstdc++5
 $ tar zxf cal_linux_1012.tar.gz
 $ ./OracleCalendar_inst/gui_install.sh 

Problems with recent releases

However, under newer releases (such as Debian Lenny or Ubuntu Hardy), the installer fails with the following error:

 Preparing to install...
 Extracting the JRE from the installer archive...
 Unpacking the JRE...
 Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...
 Configuring the installer for this system's environment...
 nawk: error while loading shared libraries: libm.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
 dirname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
 /bin/ls: error while loading shared libraries: librt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
 basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
 dirname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
 basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
 
 Launching installer...
 
 grep: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
 /tmp/install.dir.3468/Linux/resource/jre/bin/java: error while loading shared libraries: libpthread.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
 

(Note: the entire error is included here for the benefit of those trying to search for this problem. "/tmp/install.dir.3468/" will vary from run to run though.)

Fixing the installer

This error is relatively easy to fix, if you remove some strange hacks from the installer script. The sequence for installing the calendar then becomes:

 $ tar zxf cal_linux_1012.tar.gz
 $ sed -i 's/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/' OracleCalendar_inst/cal_linux
 $ ./OracleCalendar_inst/cal_linux 

The installer is pretty noisy and will generate some (harmless) errors still, but it will work!