Monday, February 11, 2008

Using Websphere and WAS under Ubuntu Linux

Some notes about using Websphere ND and RAD under Ubuntu Linux 7.10.

Because Ubuntu uses dash as the default shell (/bin/sh is a link to /bin/dash not /bin/bash) and websphere installation
too requires bash, although it erroneously uses /bin/sh you have two options:
  • Change the link /bin/sh to /bin/bash instead of /bin/dash.
  • Change /bin/sh to /bin/bash in the websphere shell scripts.
To change to websphere shell scripts you can use the following command, that I found on the web (replace paths to meet you installation):
sudo perl -p -i -e "s/\/sh$/\/bash/" /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/bin/*.sh

To install Rational Applicaton Developer (RAD v7) on a recent Ubuntu you need to
specify some options to java, or your java gui windows will be completely
blank, making it hard to to any installation :-).
To make it work, simply set this environment variable before running
the installer:
export IBM_JAVA_OPTIONS=-Dawt.toolkit=sun.awt.motif.MToolkit

2 comments:

eBosses said...

Good info for WebSphere portal jobs. I'm going to be a bit anal here, but you mentioned some Java options but only provided one Java option that needed to be specified. Are there other options that I will need to consider changing as well or is this the main one?

tomas said...

That's the only one I'm aware of. I'm not a Websphere fan though and haven't used Websphere since I wrote the blog post :-)