Automatix for the people

I have always had a love/hate relationship with Linix. If I didn’t need to support it then I wouldn’t install it on a desktop. Before you go up the wall, I didn’t say anything about servers; that’s a whole other story. So why wouldn’t I install it? Well it’s simply because it isn’t easy to install. And I do know what I’m talking about! Over the last number of years I’ve tried to install/have installed RedHat, Fedora and Debian.
You’re probably wondering what is so difficult about it. Well, it all begins with the profusion of Linux distributions/flavours (Each one freer than the other, and each with their own particularities). Once the distribution has been chosen then the long task of installing begins. It can be rather painful. I have an older Dell Optiplex for my Linux escapades and one would have thought that all drivers would be available for that kind of machine. Well, think again. None of the above mentioned Linux flavours was able to recognize, for example, the graphics card in my machine, which meant that additional manual interventions were required afterwards. It may be a piece of cake for hackers but it’s far from user friendly for beginners. Things get worse when one decides to put two Linux flavours on the same machine, each in their own partitions. For some reason they don’t recognize the counter part and mess up the MBR by installing their own boot manager and treating the other Linux as though it isn’t there.
Since Core 5 was released recently, I have been torn by doubt(s) as to whether I should install it and spend a couple of hours on getting it up and running, or whether to change tack and go for another distribution. I’ve read a lot of reviews on Ubuntu and, despite people in forums claiming that this distribution is suitable only for wimps, it came out nicely most of the time. The most appealing factor was its ease of use, and as consequence it’s user friendliness. So I decided to give it a go. The following is a report on how things went in my quest to get it up and have the SAP Java GUI running.

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Ubuntu is a totally free distribution, you can even ask them to send the installation CD -yes, it fits on only one CD- to you free of charge.  The reason that they are able to do this is because the whole project is funded by a company called Canonical. If that doesn’t ring any bells it’s a company that promotes free software that was founded by Mark Shuttleworth. Yes, it’s that South African guy that founded Thawte and sold it to Verisign four years later thereby becoming a billionaire at the age of 26. He did some extravagant things, like paying 20 million USD for a trip in a Russian spacecraft, with that money. And since he still had some money left over he founded some projects, Ubuntu among them.
It isn’t exactly a new Linux as such as it’s derived from Debian. The reason for that is the fact that Shuttleworth used to be a Debian developer.
Enough talking, time for some action. Let’s do some installations.

Smooth and less smooth.
The first thing to decide is whether you want to install Ubuntu or Kubuntu, depending on whether you want to use a Gnome or a KDE shell. When you’ve made up your mind, you need to download and burn the correct iso to CD. After that, the installation disk will ask for a language/country, keyboard, hostname, partitions, time zone and an initial user. There’s nothing more to it and it goes really smoothly. It doesn’t take more than 30 mins. And that’s on the same aforementioned machine where it took ages to install!
So in my enthusiasm I decided to also install Ubuntu at home on a self assembled machine which is also a couple of years old. And that went far from smoothly.  The installation froze on the ACPI for my Asus P4P800 motherboard, despite having installed the latest BIOS.
Starting with linux acpi=off or nonacpi didn’t help. After a while I discovered that
linux acpi=ht apm=power_off was the magic sentence to get it up and running.
Once having been able to start the installation, I discovered new screens where my input was needed. Since I use fixed IP addresses behind my router it couldn’t find any DHCP info.
Furthermore it discovered that I already had other operating systems on my machine. Despite the fact that I already have a boot manager installed, it wanted to use its own manager. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, but I didn’t see any way to avoid installing that boot manager and was forced to let it install on the partition I’d reserved for Ubuntu. That means that when I launch I now see 2 boot managers. The last point to bring to your attention is the fact that the Ubntu installer decided that graphics cards like mine have a multitude of resolutions. Pick a good one, otherwise it’ll install a very basic resolution and you’ll need to mess around with config. files afterwards.

Not my cup of coffee
Now that the installation, and eventual version upgrades of Ubuntu, has been done we can focus on the installation of the SAP GUI for Java.  When reviewing the README, you will discover that Ubuntu, as such, isn’t supported whereas Sun JRE 1.4 is supported. I didn’t take that advice too seriously, so I continued to install. When you start the GUI after the install, you will discover that it won’t work. The reason is simple. Due to some strange license restriction, one isn’t allowed to package the Sun JRE within a distribution and (in the case of Ububtu) GNU Java is delivered instead. If you do want to have the Sun engine, you need to download it from the Sun site and install it by yourself. Luckily, Sun will be revising this policy soon and will be announcing in the JavaOne conference that they will be more flexible on that matter and make distribution easier.
For the time being you need to do it yourself and you can do it in different ways:

1. Download from the Sun site and install it
2. Manually install the packages
3. Use package install scripts

I will elaborate on the latter 2 methods. Let’s start with the manual method.

The more automatic method is to do the installation using scripts like EasyUbuntu and Automatix. Be careful with these scripts though. They might overwrite your configuration files and I’ve also seen some discussion forums indicating that using these scripts might pose some security risks.

Where are you?
When you want to start the SAP GUI now, you will see that it still will not work. It complains that it can’t find libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3. You can solve this by installing the GNU stdc++ library.
OK, we’ve done that.  Let’s give it another try. We’re a step further now, but it still won’t run though. This time it doesn’t find a certain JPlatin thing, which is strange since the relevant files are in the same directory as the SAP GUI start script. In order to solve that I’ve added the –Djava.library.path=the_bin_dir_of_the_GUI to the JRE_ARGS variable to the guilogin script.
Surprise, surprise. As you can see things work perfectly now.

To sum up – one can install the SAP GUI for Java on an Ubuntu Linux. It may take some time, but it’s worth the effort.