When installing Oracle RAC on VMWare hosts, I don't want to install any desktop management system (both KDE and GNOME) for Oracle installer or other Java based configuration tools, it will make the VMWare host too big and take too much memory to run them, so I just install a basic X-Window system, and get xterm works fine.
I run the following commands on RedHat Advanced Server 4 Update 5 version. The Linux was installed by minimum packages. First step is to install the basic development package. The X-Window requires the cpp package.
rpm -i gcc-3.4.6-8.i386.rpm \
cpp-3.4.6-8.i386.rpm \
glibc-devel-2.3.4-2.36.i386.rpm \
glibc-headers-2.3.4-2.36.i386.rpm \
glibc-kernheaders-2.4-9.1.100.EL.i386.rpm
Install the X-Window packages.
rpm -i xorg-x11-6.8.2-1.EL.18.i386.rpm \
chkfontpath-1.10.0-2.i386.rpm \
fonts-xorg-base-6.8.2-1.EL.noarch.rpm \
xinitrc-4.0.14.3-1.noarch.rpm \
xorg-x11-font-utils-6.8.2-1.EL.18.i386.rpm \
xorg-x11-xauth-6.8.2-1.EL.18.i386.rpm \
xorg-x11-xfs-6.8.2-1.EL.18.i386.rpm \
switchdesk-4.0.6-3.noarch.rpm \
ttmkfdir-3.0.9-20.el4.i386.rpm
rpm -i fonts-xorg-75dpi-6.8.2-1.EL.noarch.rpm
rpm -i xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-6.8.2-1.EL.18.i386.rpm
Instal X-Window utilitys, such as xclock, to check whether we can run GUI program finally.
rpm -i xorg-x11-tools-6.8.2-1.EL.18.i386.rpm \
xorg-x11-Mesa-libGLU-6.8.2-1.EL.18.i386.rpm
Install the xterm package.
rpm -i xterm-192-7.el4.i386.rpm
Start X-Window font service (xfs).
service xfs start
The whole X-Window just take 70MB disk space, and it can run Oracle installer and other Oracle's Java based GUI utilities.