As still a lot of people seem to look for my old Oracle & Mac OSX posts I have chosen to keep them here:

How to install Oracle 10g on Mac OSX 10.4

I finally managed to get Oracle to install on Mac OS X 10.4. Most of it I did with the help of Journeyman's blog and the Oracle Documentation.

Pre-requisites
You have downloaded oracle 10.1 from otn.oracle.com

Create users and groups

1. As root create the dba group:
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Check that the creation succeeded with:
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2. As root create the Oracle user:
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Please note that there is a type in line 3 above: It should be "nicl . - append /users/oracle gid 601"

Check that the creation succeeded with:
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3. As root set up the software and directories:

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4. As root extract the Oracle software to the correct location and change the ownership to the Oracle user:

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Basic Tiger setup:
1. Set OSX to use the gcc 3.3 compiler:

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Oracle setup:
1. As root configure the kernel parameters:

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To keep those paramters add the following lines to your /etc/sysctl.conf file:
kern.maxproc=2068
kern.maxprocperuid=2068

2. As Oracle create the oracle bash profile
Create a file named .bash_profile in the oracle user's home directory with your ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_SID.

Example:
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3. As oracle launch the Oracle installer:

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The installation will fail towards the end complaining lost TNS when running database creation wizard. Just hit abort.

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5. As Oracle relink Oracle:

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6. As Oracle run dbca to create an instance:
Just type dbmca in a terminal window.

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7. Run root.sh as root when asked to:
This script will appear hang at end and displaying a message "Expecting the CRS daemons to be up within 600 seconds."
The CRS is only available on OSX Server so simply Ctrl-C terminate the process.

8. You are done. Start up your new Oracle instance from a command prompt ...

I got Oracle to start automatically on my Power Book. Reading the Oracle documentation helped a lot but it still took a lot of fiddling around to get it to work.

How to automatically start Oracle on Mac OSX 10.4
1. Sudo to root

2. Edit the file /etc/oratab: Set the line SID:ORACLE_HOME:{Y|N} to Y

3. Create a new directory (as root) /Library/StatupItems/Oracle

4. Download the Oracle startup script and edit it in a text editor (Note that the name of this file must be Oracle):
Change the ORACLE_HOME variable to reflect the location of your local ORACLE_HOME
If you don't use Oracle http server remove the startup and shutdown lines for the http server

5. Copy the file Oracle to /Library/StatupItems/Oracle

6. Download the script StartupParameters.plist file and place it in the same directory

7. Change the ownership of the new files:
cd to /Library/StatupItems/Oracle
chown root:wheel *
chmod 700