Getting WebSphere Portal to install on Ubuntu

Posted: May 4th, 2009 | Author: Graham | Filed under: howto | Tags: , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

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 :

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

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.

7 Comments on “Getting WebSphere Portal to install on Ubuntu”

  1. 1 Michael Pacey said at 6:39 am on May 16th, 2009:

    Nice one thanks! Scratched my head for a couple of hours before finding your page.

  2. 2 Michael Pacey said at 7:00 am on May 16th, 2009:

    PS – this worked for me to get WAS 7.0 working on an Ubuntu-based distro.

  3. 3 Sascha said at 1:32 am on August 28th, 2009:

    Tx a lot for that info! I already went mad with installing fixpack by fixpack.
    Had a different return code, but it helped also with profile setup for WAS7.0 including RAD test environment.

    Thank you, Graham, again!

  4. 4 Getting WebSphere Application 7 Installed on Ubuntu 9.04 by pingudownunder.com said at 12:58 pm on September 10th, 2009:

    [...] and the fails silently, which is nice.) To fix this you need to relink back to bash (according to Graham, this actually fixes a number of third-party software installation [...]

  5. 5 Jefferson said at 2:27 am on December 4th, 2009:

    I could install WAS 7 on Ubuntu 9.10 but the installation of Portal 6.1 hangs on step 5 of 5. The log (/opt/IBM/WebSphere/Portal/PortalServer/log/wpinstalllog.txt) does not show any error. Can anybody help me?

  6. 6 Graham said at 10:48 am on December 7th, 2009:

    Hi Jefferson,

    I’m doing an install of Portal 615 on Ubuntu 9.10 at the moment, and will post back solutions as I find them.

    Cheers,

    Graham

  7. 7 5 Steps to installing Portal 6.1.5 on Ubuntu 9.10 | Tork Wrench said at 2:06 pm on December 7th, 2009:

    [...] 4. Unlink /bin/sh and link it to /bin/bash. [...]

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