posting the error message would be better....
maybe this helps:
be sure, the you hav set ALL environmental vars BEFORE starting the webserver these are:
ORACLE_HOME=/opt/oracle/product/8.1.6
NLS_LANG german_germany.WE8ISO8859P9
ORACLE_SID=HOME
ORA_NLS33=/opt/oracle/product/8.1.6/ocommon/nls/admin/data
(values are examples)
put them into the startupskript of your webserver