A couple of gotcha’s here…
If you get an error saying that OC4J configuration issue <blah blah instance> not found (often TSH1), check the ORACLE_SID variable to make sure it’s correct. The ‘$ORACLE_HOME/bin/emctl start dbconsole’ command should now work. Check this by looking at http://servername/1158/em (by default)
The other one is that when you start the Enterprise [...]
If you need to install Sun’s java on Debian (or ubuntu, presumably), you have to add the non-free repository to your list. This will only work for Java 1.5 or greater as far as I know.
cd /etc/apt
vi sources.list
Check that the non-free repository is in there e.g:
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
Then it’s the usual:
apt-get update
apt-get [...]