installing cx_Oracle on Unix/Solaris

[Steve]

I'm posting this message here, so that someone googling here will be
able to find it.

I was having problems installing cx_Oracle on Solaris.  The build would
fail with a message:

> ld: fatal: file /apps/oracle/prod/9.2/lib/libclntsh.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

I found the solution on Grig Gheorghiu's blog.  Grig had similar
problems when installing on UNIX, specifically AIX.  You can find his
very useful report on how he solved the problem, here:

http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/05/installing-and-using-cxoracle-on-unix.html

and also here:

http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/07/installing-python-241-and-cxoracle-on.html

To put matters in a nutshell, Oracle 9i installs the 64-bit libraries
in $ORACLE_HOME/lib and the 32-bit libraries in $ORACLE_HOME/lib32.
Since setup.py is looking by default in $ORACLE_HOME/lib, it finds the
64-bit libraries and it fails.

The trick (at least for me) was to change "lib" to "lib32" in my
ORACLE_HOME environment setting, and in setup.py.

MUCH thanks to Grig for his useful blog!