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,

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/software/access/linux/downloads.html

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.

http://embraceubuntu.com/2005/09/23/installing-using-an-rpm-file/

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.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=13948037

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:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=39556

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!

Hibernate problems with my Windows 7 RC

I went through a few reinstalls recently and finally found a strange situation with Windows RC’s Hibernate function. It just didn’t want to work.

When I clicked on the Sleep button in Start menu (I use „hybrid sleep” if available), nothing happened. I looked in the Event viewer if something strange can be seen, but found nothing. I turned off hybrid sleep and tried to hibernate the PC, but no change. Screen went to black for a second, then I got the logon screen again.

Let’s think a little, what is happening during going to sleep mode? The system writes the memory content to a file on the hard drive with some additional info (processor state, etc.) and temporarily modifies the boot loader to start from hibernation, instead of normal booting. The file is there in the root of drive „C:”. Let’s see the boot configuration.

Oops. Now what is this? Google has several answers to this in various tech forums, but none of them worked for me. I could create another data store, but I couldn’t use it.

I have a multiboot system with usually at least 3 operating systems through Ubuntu’s Grub.

My Ubuntu with the Grub is on the first hard drive and my Windows 7 is on the second hard drive. If I changed the order and booted directly from Windows Boot Loader, everything worked OK!

So let’s take a look at the Grub menu now.

Something’s missing, right? Yes, changing the hard drive order, with command ’map’.

Let’s see what it does. The GNU GRUB Manual says:

Command: map to_drive from_drive

Map the drive from_drive to the drive to_drive. This is necessary when you chain-load some operating systems, such as DOS, if such an OS resides at a non-first drive. Here is an example:

          grub> map (hd0) (hd1)

          grub> map (hd1) (hd0)

The example exchanges the order between the first hard disk and the second hard disk.

So we need this:

That looks just a little better now. Windows „likes to be” the first HD, so Grub needs to fake it. After reboot to Windows 7, the Hibernate function worked perfectly, and “bcdedit” showed this picture:

So this is a good example of how you can fix a Windows related problem from a Linux environment (because I edited Grub from Ubuntu Jaunty).