So my dream of setting up an Oracle Application Server at home on my Ubuntu Linux box is futile. Because Oracle AS does not install onto Debian-based Linux, at least not by default. Of course I did not find this out until I had finished downloading 2 GB worth of files from Oracle. And extracting all of them.
Now the primary reason for wanting a Portal at home is so I can learn and play. It appears I won't be able to learn or play about the Portal, but perhaps I can still learn and play with portlets. The Oracle Portlet Development Kit (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/pdk.html) appears to only require OC4J, which can run anywhere including Debian Linux.
So that's what I will be trying to do next instead. I've downloaded the PDK and already unzipped it--since it's Java there's really no installation beyond moving the files to wherever you want them to reside. The remaining issue is that I only have a JRE on this machine, not a full JDK. So I'll need to install a JDK to get the Java compiler that OC4J is going to require.
I'll be attempting all that tonight, and if it goes well I'll document it this weekend with another post in this forum.