Hi Tapiwa,
It seems like Brian had the same problem on RH7.2 that I have on Woody, but "lsnrctl stop" which helped him, doesn't help in my case...
I tried once more with "kernel.shmmax = 134217728" in /etc/sysctl.conf (50% of my 256Mb ram), and this time the listener.ora was created!
Of course I also applied the Oracle glibc patch since Woody comes with glibc2.2 and I edited the "root.sh" file (you need to change the path to awk and sed on Debian, etc.).
If anyone has succeded in installing 8.1.7 on Debian before, it would be nice to have it confirmed that it can be done 😊
