How to get HANA hdblcmgui to work using Putty or MobaXterm

When trying to install HANA DB on a fresh SUSE environment and the administrator tries to follow our documentation to install HANA, we say to use either hdblcmgui or hdblcm.

The issue when the administrator tries to execute the command hdblcmgui and faces the following error below:

SAP HANA Installer Runtime Error:
perl compilation error (loading LCM::Gui::App::LCMGuiApp):

cannot show splash screen: Can’t load ‘<PATH>/Wx.so’ for module Wx: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at DynaLoader.pm line 193.
at SDB/Wx/Splash.pm line 45.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at SDB/Install/App/Gui.pm line 6.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at LCM/Gui/App/LCMGuiApp.pm line 6.

In this blog I will address the issues and what need to be done to fix them.

• Running GUI application
  • The first step is the administrator needs to check and validate if the VM or physical machine is configured to run a graphic gui application. The way to test this do the following: Open a terminal session execute xclock
    1. If you got this error: Error: Can’t open display:
       1. Then you need to configure X11 forwarding and DISPLAY environment variable
    2. If you got error that the command is not found, -bash: xclock: command not found , then you need install xclock.
       For example: zypper install xclock
  • Configuring VM to support X11 forwarding
    • In your VM from a terminal window issue the following:
      1. sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
      2. Search for X11Forwarding, X11DisplayOffset and X11UseLocalhost
      3. Remove the # sign from each parameter if exists
      4. Save it
      5. Next issue this: sudo vi /etc/ssh/ssh_config
      6. Search for ForwardX11
      7. If there is a pound sign, “#”, in front of the parameter, remove it
      8. It should be ForwardX11 yes
      9. Save the changes
      10. Next make sure sshd is enabled for example
          sudo systemctl enable sshd
      11. Now start the service
          sudo systemctl start sshd
    • Configuring DISPLAY variable MobaXterm
      • To configure this for MobaXterm, do the following:
        1. Move the mouse to the top right corner where it says X server
           
        2. It will display the IP address of where is going to forward the X11
        3. From the terminal window issue the following:
           1. export DISPLAY=<IP_FROM_STEP1>:0.0
           2. echo $DISPLAY
           3. It should show you the variable is set
           4. Execute this from the terminal:
              xclock
• Configuring DISPLAY with PUTTY
  • To configure this for PUTTY tool, do the following:
    1. Follow this KBA, 2358582 – How-To: Configure graphical user interface for SAP HANA platform lifecycle management tools via PUTTY
    2. Note: sometimes the VM is not configured to understand the localhost IP address is 127.0.0.1, therefore; try to use the IP address of your workstation where you are using PUTTY tool from
  • Execute this from the terminal:
    xclock

Running hdblcmgui

Now that we have everything configured and assuming xclock or any gui application can be ran, we are ready to run hdblcmgui.

1. Open a terminal window and navigate to the location of where hdblcmgui exists
2. Execute: hdblcmgui
   2. If everything works fine, this is great, but if you are like me and got the same error as before, there is one more thing needs to be done:
      perl compilation error (loading LCM::Gui::App::LCMGuiApp):
      cannot show splash screen: Can’t load ‘<PATH>/Wx.so’ for module Wx: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at DynaLoader.pm line 193.
      at SDB/Wx/Splash.pm line 45.
      BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at SDB/Install/App/Gui.pm line 6.
      BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at LCM/Gui/App/LCMGuiApp.pm line 6.
   3. From the terminal window in your VM execute the following command to install the missing library:
      zypper install gtk2
   4. Now test the installer and it should now display the graphic interface of the installer
   5. If you faced this error
      AP HANA Installer Runtime Error:
      perl compilation error (loading LCM::Gui::App::LCMGuiApp):
      cannot show splash screen: Can’t load ‘<PATH>/SAP_HANA_DATABASE/instruntime/Wx.so’ for module Wx: libgthread-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at DynaLoader.pm line 193.
      at SDB/Wx/Splash.pm line 45.
      BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at SDB/Install/App/Gui.pm line 6.
      BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at LCM/Gui/App/LCMGuiApp.pm line 6.
   6. From the terminal window execute this command
      zypper install glib2-devel
   7. Last make sure the following library, libssh2-1, is installed if you are running SUSE 12 SP4 or higher. Please refer to the following SAP Note: 2205917
      zypper install libssh2-1

Please share your feedback below.

Thank you