Thanks, Bruno, that got me a (small) step further. Strace shows that it's the oracle executable, trying to load libskgxp8.so, at the same spot where my Redhat 8 installation is trying to load libjox8.so instead.
Now ldd shows something interesting:
Redhat 8:
[oracle@ragamuffin bin]$ ldd oracle
libjox8.so => /export/oracle/product/8.1.7/lib/libjox8.so (0x40014000)
libobk.so => /export/oracle/product/8.1.7/lib/libobk.so (0x40398000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x403a1000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x403a4000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x403c6000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x403db000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
Redhat Enterprise:
[root@abyssinian bin]# ldd oracle
libskgxp8.so => not found
libjox8.so => not found
libobk.so => not found
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb75dd000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0xb75ba000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7568000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb742c000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb75eb000)
libjox8.so and libobk.so are where they are supposed to be, so it must be the path to them that is wrong. And libskgxp8.so shouldn't be there; according to Metalink it does not exist on Linux for 8.1.7.
I also saw in the strace files that the Enterprise system keeps looking for libraries in the i686 directories, where the Redhat 8 one does not. So I'm guessing that there is a makefile out there getting confused about what OS it's being run on.
Hmm... very interesting indeed!
