Redhat – way to install pip and zlib-devel on RHEL 5.7 without Red Hat entitlement

I've been searching the web and one solution seems to be making a kickstart script that will intall only the necessary packages. But I find this difficult and have several doubts about how to maintain the system dependencies afterwards.

Making a kickstart file is not so hard: look in /root of one of your installed servers for a file called anaconda-ks.cfg. That is a kickstart file to make a new server looking like the existing one. Every RH, Fedora or CentOS server has that file.

You can edit the file in system-config-kickstart if you are unfamiliar with writing kickstart files. You do need X for that though.

How do you install minimal Red Hat servers? Is it Ok to use kickstart or will I have dependency problems in the installation or in updates? Is there any way to avoid installing the graphical environment for iAS?

You are doing fine with a kickstart file. Kickstart do affect the way you update after installation. During installation, dependencies are calculated automatically. Packages you removed (if that is at all possible) that are needed anyway are added. You cannot install a system with broken dependencies for the system. Dependencies for Oracle is a complete different matter though.

If Oracle needs a graphical environment (and it does, I know it sucks, but it does), you have no option but to install X. However, afaik, Oracle needs X because it has a graphical installer. You do not need X afterwards. So after install, you can remove X.

In my shop we only install a very minimal set of X libraries, btw. Just enough to run xclock (and thus the installer) remotely with X forwarding. That's enough.

Oracle has more insane dependencies. There are some ancient C library compat packages the Oracle installer needs. Not because it actually needs them, but because the zip implementation they ship needs them. Why do they ship that zip implementation? Rumor has it, that the very old zip implementation Oracle ships has more favorable licensing terms (as in: it's not GPL'ed), so they refuse to use a newer implementation. Just rumors though, never heard confirmation...

Short of doing installations of both and running a fancy diff between the two and manually picking through the output, there's no real way to prove to most people that they're the same. Yes, they use the same compiler, and the same linker, and the same libraries, all with the same options, but many people don't see induction as proof.