SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP 7.40 SP 8 – Developer Edition to Download: Installation on Debian Linux 8.0 (jessie)

This article relates to the SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP 7.40 SP8 – Developer Edition to Download. It might be placed at an intermediate level between the Concise Installation Instructions and the detailed Step-by-Step Guide by Thea Hillenbrand.

Personally, I prefer Debian to Ubuntu on headless server systems. It might be just a personal choice, but Ubuntu is a bit too “bunt” for me (sorry, bad pun). There are a few things to observe when installing the AS ABAP Developer Edition on a Debian Jessie system, so I decided to share my notes. I’m assuming you have a basic knowledge about Debian and have read the articles above as well as the readme file that comes with the download – you will definitely need the latter since the passwords are in there 🙂

I’m using a headless Virtualbox setup, but I won’t go into the details of its installation – there are plenty of instructions out there.

Install a pretty standard Debian 8.0 (jessie) amd64 system. Choose English (US) as language and then your country, making sure that you select the correct locale en_US.UTF-8. Partition the disk using the All files in one partition preset. After installing the base system, the software selection dialog appears – be sure to only select SSH server and standard system utilities here. Don’t forget to install the guest additions for your virtualization software (instructions for Virtualbox are here).

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add contrib and non-free to the main sources, followed by

apt-get update

You need unrar from non-free because unrar-free is broken; you won’t be able to extract the multi-volume archives. Now on to the dependencies:

apt-get install csh uuid uuid-runtime

update-rc.d uuidd enable

/etc/init.d/uuidd start

apt-get install unrar libaio1 lib32z1 libxtst6

That last library is required for the graphical installer, even on a headless system (ssh -XY <yourhostname>). Then edit /etc/hosts to permanently assign the IP address to the host name, thus making the installer happy. Alternatively, you might run the installer with the command line parameter -s.

Finally unpack the installation files and start the installation:

unrar x TD74SPS8_part1.rar

chmod u+x install.sh

./install.sh

Proceed as directed by the installer – this will take some time.

After the installation, edit /usr/sap/NPL/SYS/profile/NPL_DVEBMGS00_<yourhostname> to add the parameter icm/host_name_full if necessary and change PHYS_MEMSIZE to 30% as described in the Step-by-Step Guide. Request and install the license key as described in the readme and start hacking away…