The main thing you have to do, supposedly, is to run their patch files after installing to deal with glibc version issues.
I've not gotten that far with 8.1.7, but I know others who have (Furfly.net, for example).
I think Oracle's Linux support pretty much sucks, and don't understand why. It (or a *BSD variant if they decide they don't like Linux) is their best bet vs. MS SQL server + NT.
