A Linux trick on Oracle setup

Have you ever tried to install Oracle Database on GNU/Linux and faced the insufficient memory issue below?
Oracle Database 10g Express Edition requires 1024 MB of swap space. This system has ??? MB of swap space.

Well, I've just been caught by that when attempting to set it up on a virtual machine.

# dpkg -i oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.1_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 125364 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking oracle-xe-universal (from oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.1_i386.deb) ...
This system does not meet the minimum requirements for swap space.  Based on 
the amount of physical memory available on the system, Oracle Database 10g 
Express Edition requires 1024 MB of swap space. This system has 1019 MB 
of swap space.  Configure more swap space on the system and retry the installation.
dpkg: error processing oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.1_i386.deb (--install):
 subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.1_i386.deb

Fortunately a true Operating System can handle it seamlessly! Here are the steps I followed.

Setup is claiming about just 5 megabytes... Well, let's give him it. But no more and no less! Let's create a zeroed dummy file with dd:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=5m.swp bs=1M count=5
5+0 records in
5+0 records out
5242880 bytes (5.2 MB) copied, 0.0132488 s, 396 MB/s

Here you go, an exactly 5 MB size zeroed file:

# ls -la 5m.swp 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5242880 2011-10-19 10:39 5m.swp

Let's check out the available memory in the system using free:

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1026080     921612     104468          0      27036     674936
-/+ buffers/cache:     219640     806440
Swap:      1046524       2552    1043972

Alright, you need it, we'll give you:

# swapon 5m.swp

Are you satisfied now?

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1026080     921736     104344          0      27044     674936
-/+ buffers/cache:     219756     806324
Swap:      1051640       2552    1049088

Let's retry running Oracle installer:

# dpkg -i oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.1_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 125364 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking oracle-xe-universal (from oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.1_i386.deb) ...

That's it! Although that ridiculous additional 5 MB swap won't be automatically available for the next reboot, we still can tune Oracle to allocate less memory than standard settings.