I've just spent most of the morning helping our DBAs install the Oracle client software on a freshly installed Debian box. Why, oh why, do you need to run some dodgy Java GUI installer to install a fscking database client? Why can't they give, say, a statically compiled binary? A shell script? ANYTHING but this!
Doing the installer in Java just makes the dependencies that much greater. And the Java stuff seems to rely on quite old versions of everything, including C++ libraries and GCC. How dumb.
Sure, Oracle don't formally support Debian as a platform but even on their "supported" RedHat platform you have to jump through hoops to get the thing installed. Why?