Ran into another interesting little challenge today.  While installing SOA Suite onto a machine which already had another, completely separate Oracle product installation on it (albeit under a different userid), the installer helpfully reported that it could not access /home/oracle/oraInventory.

To get around this, I went and copied the /etc/oraInst.loc file to /etc/fmwInst.loc and updated the contents to point to a new directory in my ‘fmw’ user’s home directory, and then ran the installer with the option to point to this new file:

runInstaller -invPtrLoc /etc/fmwInst.loc