Infrastructure Software

Hi

I originally posted this to the "install and update" forum, but I believe this group is more appropriate, I apologize for the duplication, I changed the title to make it clearer what the problem I still have is, thank you in advance!.

I installed oracle applications on RHEL 4 using rapidInstall (OA version 11.5.10) on Linux, when the install wizard finished I was able to click on the button to check the URL and it worked kind of fine, I restarted the while linux server (it's actually running on a virtual machine) and when it came back, oracle services were not started by default... after some research I think I found out what to run and how to run it.. however still have a problem and many questions, I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing to start with...

note my SID is PROD,
both my db and appl belong to the same linux user

1) is oracle applications supposed to be started automatically when linux boots after a new install ? I didn't see any option for that in the installer, and it just won't work in my server, I could not find any documentation that explains this, nor how to manually run the oracle applications server... I did find some info in the forums, what I did was:
run the database environment file to setup the environment:
. proddb/PROD_oraclelinux.env
ran the scripts:
proddb/9.2.0/appsutil/scripts/PROD_oraclelinux/addbctl.sh start
proddb/9.2.0/appsutil/scripts/PROD_oraclelinux/addlnctl.sh start PROD
both of which completed successfully no errors

ran the applications environment
. prodappl/APPSPROD_oraclelinux.env
ran the script
prodcomn/admin/scripts/PROD_oraclelinux/adstrtal.sh oracleusr/pwd
which also completed without error

now I was able to get to http://oraclelinux:8000
HOWEVER
when I click on any of the two login links provided:
http://oraclelinux.smart.domain:8000/oa_servlets/AppsLogin
http://oraclelinux.smart.domain:8000/servlets/weboam/oam/oamLogin

the only thing I get is a blank page, I can never get to the logon screen where the userid and password are prompted... I was able to get to that screen once, but only immediately after running the rapid install wizard, after several unsuccessful attempts to logon, I started to get the blank page consistently, after which I rebooted the server and found out that it didn't restart automatically...

any ideas ?

questions:
1) anybody knows if how to start oracle applications, or configure it to start automatically after (linux) server recycle is documented somewhere by oracle? I would greatly appreciate you pointing me to it I just could not find it... but I do have very limited experience with oracle...
2) any clues about the blank page ? the request transforms into
http://oraclelinux.smart.domain:8000/OA_HTML/AppsLocalLogin.jsp?requestUrl=APPSHOMEPAGE&cancelUrl=http%3A%2F%2Foraclelinux.smart.domain%3A8000%2Foa_servlets%2Foracle.apps.fnd.sso.AppsLogin
which doesn't look that strange...
a view-source in the browser shows only two meaningful lines:
<!-- $Header: AppsLocalLogin.jsp 115.82 2005/03/28 21:08:08 scheruku noship $ -->
and
</html>
separated by 57 blank lines...

any help appreciated, thanks !