Following this HOWTO you should be able to get "Oracle 8i, version 8.1.7, Enterprise Edition for Linux" installed on a RedHat 7.X distribution (and, we hope, on distributions based/derived from it.) You will also have some few hints at how to create a database. We decide to write this notes because we did not manage to get through the installation, simply following the already existing "Oracle 8 for Linux" HOWTOs, and Oracle documentation and we found people on the net experiencing our problems.