Weblogic Server 10.3.6 Silent Install fails because of wrong formatting of silent.xml

Today I tried to silent install a Weblogic Server 10.3.6. As documentation recommends, I used the sample silent.xml and modified some parameters.

Then I tried to start the installation, but it fails:

[weblogic@linux silent]$ $JAVA_HOME/bin/java -jar /net/share/ofm11g/wls1036_generic.jar -Djava.io.tmpdir=$TMPDIR -mode=silent -silent_xml=./silent.xml
Extracting 0%....................................................................................................100%
[Fatal Error] :3:6: The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.DOMParser.parse(DOMParser.java:246)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(DocumentBuilderImpl.java:284)
at javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder.parse(DocumentBuilder.java:124)
at com.bea.plateng.wizard.installer.common.parsers.TemplateParser.parserWrapper(TemplateParser.java:53)
at com.bea.plateng.wizard.installer.common.parsers.TemplateParser.getTemplateInfo(TemplateParser.java:71)
at com.bea.plateng.wizard.installer.common.parsers.TemplateParserHelper.getTemplateInfo(TemplateParserHelper.java:96)
at com.bea.plateng.wizard.installer.utils.SilentXmlHelper.loadSilentXml(SilentXmlHelper.java:75)
at com.bea.plateng.wizard.installer.silent.tasks.ReadSilentXMLTask.execute(ReadSilentXMLTask.java:43)
at com.bea.plateng.wizard.silent.tasks.AbstractSilentTask.run(AbstractSilentTask.java:28)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662)
Silent Install Failed!! Reason: null

The problem with the sample silent.xml is that it uses comments before the XML prolog. According to the XML spec, you can't have anything at all before the XML prolog. So the file must start with "<?xml version...".

After deleting all the comment lines above XML prolog, silent install works fine.