Usually, all you need are the libraries, which don't necessarily require sudo rights. Extract them to a place the software will be able to read from and set the following environment variables accordingly:
ORACLE_HOME=path/to/where/you/extracted/libs
TNS_ADMIN=path/to/tnsnames.ora
I have had best luck skipping tnsnames, and just specifying the host, port, etc in the connection, but it's quite possible you'll need it for cx_oracle...I don't remember from when I used it ages ago.