I started working on some new perl scripts and realized that i have not installed the libdbd-oracle-perl package on my desktop since the upgrade. If anyone is looking for how to do this on a Ubuntu Maverick machine ( I know, right before 11.04 comes out but it still worked in the alpha ).

First go to Oracle’s website and grab the rpm instant-client packages for the database that you are going to be connecting to and convert them to .deb before installing them. This needs to be done or building libdbd-oracle-perl will fail. Save these off to a temp directory that we will be using for this build:

mkdir -p ~/src/libdbd-oracle-perl
cd ~/src/libdbd-oracle-perl
sudo alien oracle-instantclient-devel-10.2.0.4-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo alien oracle-instantclient-basic-10.2.0.4-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo alien oracle-instantclient-sqlplus-10.2.0.4-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo dpkg -i oracle-instantclient-*.deb

Download the latest source packages from launchpad here or if your lucky you can use apt-get source from the ~/src/libdbd-oracle-perl directory:

apt-get source libdbd-oracle-perl

Either way you get them, you will end up with these three packages:

libdbd-oracle-perl_1.21.orig.tar.gz
libdbd-oracle-perl_1.21-2.diff.gz
libdbd-oracle-perl_1.21-2.dsc

Next, install some package building tools:

sudo apt-get install build-essential fakeroot dpkg-dev alien

Finally build us a .deb of libdbd-oracle-perl:

dpkg -i libdbd-oracle-perl_1.21-3_amd64.deb

If you want to test to see that it has registered you can run this:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use DBD::Oracle;
print $DBD::Oracle::VERSION,"\n";'