Recover an #Oracle installation from a full disk backup in #Linux

Reinstalling things like Oracle is always a hassle and takes about one day to make it work. Lucky for me I made a full back-up of my old disk when I upgraded to a new laptop.

On the new laptop I did a fresh install of Fedora 28.

The idea is to migrate my old Oracle installation (Oracle 12.02) without having to reinstall and reconfigure everything.

Some considerations:

This procedure applies in the case the old installation OS is almost the same preferably the same version as on the new machine.

Do the following on the new machine:

STEP 1. Copy the old /etc/sysctl.conf
For the settings to take effect execute: sysctl -p

STEP 2. Copy the old /etc/security/limits.conf

STEP 3. Copy the old /etc/pam.d/login

STEP 4. Copy the old /etc/selinux/config

STEP 5. Install compatibility libs:

STEP 6. Copy the old /home/oracle

STEP 7. Copy the old /u01

STEP 8. Recreate the oracle groups and users

STEP 9. Re-apply permissions

STEP 10. Copy the old /etc/oratab

STEP 11. Make sure to create a link to libnsl.so.1
cp /usr/lib/libnsl.so.2 /usr/lib/libnsl.so.1

STEP 12. Make sure all the libs exist:
Login as oracle user, the execute ldd:

STEP 13. If all is good start oracle database and the oracle listener