Thursday, October 22, 2009

IBM iSeries Access on Ubuntu Jaunty


At the company where I work we use a software based on IBM terminal emulation for warehouse management and the like. Usually everyone logs in from the windows client, except me :-). I made it to run under Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. Let's see how!
IBM provides an rpm package for linux users,




but Ubuntu doesn't like rpm's, so we have to create a deb from it.
You can install a package converter application called Alien from the repo.




I made a mistake with the parameters of this converter: I forgot to add parameter '-c', so some scripts included in the rpm package were gone. These scripts intended to create symlinks to Client Access files, so I had to recreate the symlinks. (The error message I got, was: „error while loading shared libraries: libcwbcore.so”)
This way I didn't have to reinstall the whole package.




After the installation was done, I had to deal with some new error messages :-) The install package had some unhandled dependencies, like this one: „error while loading shared libraries: libXm.so.3”. I found a solution in this forum thread:




I had to install the 'libmotif3' package, which includes the library. OK, that's done, let's see the next one.


„Xt Warning: locale not supported by C library”


I had to generate the ISO-8859 locale for ibm5250 (instead of UTF-8) with this command:


'locale-gen en_US'.


Some other forum users needed to install a font package also ('msttcorefonts'), but I didn't need this (though it is still not installed).


And finally here is the result:







I am now able to log in to AS400 from Ubuntu.


Great :-)


So this is what IBM calls a native linux client :-) Have fun with it!

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