Piers and I got hold of the latest WAS 6.40 demo system (NW4) from the LinuxLab guys’ stand here at SAP TechEd. It contains ABAP service pack 3 and Java/J2EE service pack 7.

Since I had my small Linux server with me (that I used in my session this morning to demo some ICF stuff), we decided to blast away the previous NW4 install and have a mini installfest!

Excellent. There’s something about interesting things happening on computer screens that seem to attract the inner-geek in people … within minutes we had a small crowd of people joining Piers, Mark, Gregor and me to watch the poor little server get hammered as the RPMs were installed from the DVD.

I’m typing this post while the install goes on – here you can see a screenshot of the progress.

Small hack needed

I noticed straight away that the install.sh script supplied on the DVD crashed and burned immediately. I had a little look (open source rules again 🙂) and found it was because the script was trying to execute a KDE program ‘kdialog’ to display the licence and prompt for acceptance of the terms. (KDE is a desktop manager). I don’t have KDE installed on the server, so it was almost a non-starter.

Luckily I had a flash of inspiration, and created a symbolic link from a non-existent ‘kdialog’ to the ever-present X client utility ‘xmessage’ (I avoided copy-and-editing the script from the DVD as I would have had to change loads of relative pathnames and so on to get it to work from a new location). I reinvoked the install.sh script … and everything started perfectly. Hurrah! (If you look closely at the screenshot you can see evidence of this little hack.)

Anyway, 4 RPMs have been installed by now – it’s time for me to go back and have a look.

Update: Install complete

Ok, after less than two hours, my new NW4 system, service release one, is installed and up and running:

Nice work, LinuxLab folks!

Originally published on SAP Community