Getting WebSphere Portal to install on Ubuntu

Ok, ok, I know Ubuntu isn’t supported by IBM, but if you’re a developer, and you run Ubuntu on your laptop and would like to run Portal on there too, here’s how you do it. This should work for Debian too . I guess this isn’t really a Portal only problem, rather it’s a general Application Server + Ubuntu issue. I’ve only tried this with 6.1, but it is probably an issue with 6.0 as well, since it uses similar profile creation code.

For some reason Ubuntu, ships a shell called ‘dash’ as their default, rather than good old bash. (Well, they have their reasons.) This presents a problem for App Server, as all the scripts in AppServer/bin use #!/bin/sh (the Bourne shell) as their command interpreter, which on a Redhat machine is symlinked to /bin/bash . The reason why AppServer uses the Bourne shell is that it needs to work on AIX and Solaris too, and you can’t be sure that you have bash on one of those machines.

If you try to call wsadmin.sh on an Ubuntu system you get this error :

/opt/WebSphere/AppServer/bin/wsadmin.sh: 116: Bad substitution


Now, when you’re installing Portal, it installs AppServer, and then calls the manageprofile.sh script to create the default profile for Portal “wp_profile” . Manageprofile.sh calls a bunch of ant scripts that needs to use wsadmin.sh (you can see where I’m going here….) . You might notice in AppServer/log/wp_profile_create.log messages like this :


Checking for wsadmin listener initialization
Is wsadmin listener available? ? false
Returning with returnCode=-1
Failure detected in fatal config action.
wsadmin failed with exception = wsadmin task failed with return code :-1


It actually hangs for 20 minutes waiting for wsadmin to start!

So how do you fix it? Simply, before you install it, unlink /bin/sh -> /bin/dash , and relink so it reads /bin/sh -> /bin/bash

Carefully:

cd /bin
unlink sh
ln -s /bin/bash sh


Now the install should run properly.