I have heard that there are problems installing Oracle 8.1.7 on RH 9; haven't confirmed for myself, but it doesn't seem unlikely given all the glibc compatability issues we've been having for some time.
Also, if you are installing Oracle you unfortunately do have to care about graphical issues, because the installer requires an X server. As of a few years ago when I last tried it, the first thing the installer did was check for the presence of X even if you had used the magic flag to tell it to install from a shell script, which was especially lame since there is no output at all in that case.
