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Can’t Display 256 Colors

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If you’re reading this post, you most likely are trying to run the Oracle Database 11g or 12c runInstaller program, and it’s failing a critical dependency check and displaying an error like the one below. If so, choose n because if you choose y it won’t launch the Oracle Installer.

Starting Oracle Universal Installer...
 
Checking Temp space: must be greater than 500 MB.   Actual 30824 MB    Passed
Checking swap space: must be greater than 150 MB.   Actual 3967 MB    Passed
Checking monitor: must be configured to display at least 256 colors
    >>> Could not execute auto check for display colors using command /usr/bin/xdpyinfo. Check if the DISPLAY variable is set.    Failed <<<<
 
Some requirement checks failed. You must fulfill these requirements before
 
continuing with the installation,
 
Continue? (y/n) [n] n

The first thing to check is whether you’ve the $TERM environment variable. It’ll be set in your env list but may not be set in your .bashrc file. You can see whether it’s set by running the following command:

echo $TERM

It should return a value, like this:

xterm-256color

If you didn’t get that value, use the env command to lookup the $TERM. The correct value can be found by running the env command like this:

env | grep -i term

Add $TERM environment variable to your .bashrc file and source it after the change or reboot the user’s session:

export TERM=xterm-256color

If it still doesn’t work, some posts ask you to run xclock but you don’t generally install the xhost clients. Those articles assumes you’ve installed the xorg-x11-apps package library. That’s more or less a choice you made when installing the Linux OS. You can check for the presence of the library with the following command as the root user:

rpm -qa xorg-x11-apps

If the command fails to return a result from the search of Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) libraries, you haven’t installed it. You can install it as the root superuser with this syntax:

yum install -y xorg-x11-apps

It should display the following result when successful:

Loaded plugins: langpacks
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package xorg-x11-apps.x86_64 0:7.7-6.el7 will be installed
--> Processing Dependency: libXaw.so.7()(64bit) for package: xorg-x11-apps-7.7-6.el7.x86_64
--> Running transaction check
---> Package libXaw.x86_64 0:1.0.12-5.el7 will be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
 
Dependencies Resolved
 
=================================================================================
 Package              Arch          Version              Repository         Size
=================================================================================
Installing:
 xorg-x11-apps        x86_64        7.7-6.el7            ol7_latest        304 k
Installing for dependencies:
 libXaw               x86_64        1.0.12-5.el7         ol7_latest        190 k
 
Transaction Summary
=================================================================================
Install  1 Package (+1 Dependent package)
 
Total download size: 494 k
Installed size: 1.2 M
Downloading packages:
(1/2): libXaw-1.0.12-5.el7.x86_64.rpm                     | 190 kB  00:00:00     
(2/2): xorg-x11-apps-7.7-6.el7.x86_64.rpm                 | 304 kB  00:00:00     
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total                                            690 kB/s | 494 kB  00:00:00     
Running transaction check
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded
Running transaction
  Installing : libXaw-1.0.12-5.el7.x86_64                                    1/2 
  Installing : xorg-x11-apps-7.7-6.el7.x86_64                                2/2 
  Verifying  : libXaw-1.0.12-5.el7.x86_64                                    1/2 
  Verifying  : xorg-x11-apps-7.7-6.el7.x86_64                                2/2 
 
Installed:
  xorg-x11-apps.x86_64 0:7.7-6.el7                                               
 
Dependency Installed:
  libXaw.x86_64 0:1.0.12-5.el7                                                   
 
Complete!

After installing the xorg-x11-apps library packages, you can retry running the Oracle installer. You should now see the following successful message set:

Starting Oracle Universal Installer...
 
Checking Temp space: must be greater than 500 MB.   Actual 30809 MB    Passed
Checking swap space: must be greater than 150 MB.   Actual 3967 MB    Passed
Checking monitor: must be configured to display at least 256 colors.    Actual 16777216    Passed
Preparing to launch Oracle Universal Installer from /tmp/OraInstall2016-06-01_01-50-54AM. Please wait ...

As always, I hope this helps my students and anybody looking for a solution to a less than explicit error message.

Written by maclochlainn

June 1st, 2016 at 2:12 am