Installation notes: JES 2005Q4 on Fedora Core 4

Question

Hi,
Getting JES (with Portal Server 6) to work on a Linux platform (that's unsupported by SUN) can be a nightmare. Here's what to do with Fedora Core 4:
1. You need to install compat-libstdc++-296.i386 rpm package. This provides /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 that the application server needs.
If you don't have that package installed, install with yum:
yum install compat-libstdc++-296.i386
Note: I used...
yum provides libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3
... to find out the package.
Actually I installed compat-libstdc++-33.i386 as well, but I'm not sure did that affect anything.
2. Install pdksh
There are many ksh clones available. Fedora Core 4 ships with some version of ksh that lacks features used by PS6 install scripts. You have to get pdksh from http://www.math.mun.ca/~michael/pdksh/
Configure and install it according to the instructions. Then get rid of the ksh that came with FC4 and make sure /bin/ksh points to /usr/local/bin/ksh (if you installed pdksh to the default location).
3. Run the JES installer and everything should work out fine. The installation process meter still seems to hang when installing portal server but actually it is working hard for several minutes. You can verify that by using top.
More details on the problems that occur if you don't follow these steps (should help for other distros than FC4):
The installation process hangs when it gets to install portal server (verify with top that it isn't actually doing anything). This is because you don't have the right ksh. Using ps -aef you'll see that there are processes running ksh.
The actual problem is that the PS6 installation script is defining variables with the keyword 'local' that's not supported with ksh shipped with FC4. If you try to run the portal configuration script manually you get lines like:
opt/sun/portal/lib/postinstall_Base[21]: local : not found [ no such file or directory]
opt/sun/portal/lib/postinstall_Base[22]: local : not found [ no such file or directory]
opt/sun/portal/lib/postinstall_Base[23]: local : not found [ no such file or directory]
The JES installation program will not recover from this. So get pdksh!
If you don't have libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 the installation seems to work fine, but it will fail on deploying anything on the appserver (it won't be able to start the domain). This was the really ridiculous thing about the installer because it reported no errors even though it was failing to install anything on the appserver!
Hope this helps someone. Took me nearly two days to figure out.

Answer 1

Instead of downloading the source code for Korn Shell and going thru the manual compilation and configuration go to http://rpm.pbone.net and perform an advanced search for ksh for Red Hat 9.
You will find : pdksh-5.2.14-21.i386.rpm
Here's the url for a mirror site:
ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/fedoralegacy/redhat/9/os/i386/pdksh-5.2.14-21.i386.rpm
Download the rpm.
Remove the existing pdksh by :# rpm -e pdksh
Install the ksh of choice: rpm -ivh pdksh-5.2.14-21.i386.rpm
I was able to install JES 2005 Q4 on Fedora core 5.
Good Luck