Symphonious

Living in a state of accord.

Category Archives: Note To Self

Installing IBM Portal on Linux

When installing most if not all versions of IBM Portal on Linux, to get the installer to run you need to install a couple of extra packages:

  • openmotif
  • compat-libstdc++

Depending on the options you chose when first installing Linux there may be more – the easiest way to find them is to know that the graphical installer sends it’s error messages to /tmp/wpinstalllog.txt. It’s usually fairly easy to match the error messages up to the package you need to install to fix it.

Don’t be put off by the fact that it prints an error about not being able to connect to the X server to the terminal – that’s usually a red herring. Open an xterm instance to confirm the connection to the X server works and then go back to tracking down missing packages.

Useful Link Roundup

I have far more tabs open in NetNewsWire than I can handle, so here’s all the stuff that’s open more so I can find them again if I need them than because I actually want to comment on them or do something with them right now:

When Can I Use? – Useful page for getting a rough idea of the current state of support for web stuff in browsers.  Not perfect but definitely a very good starting point.

HTML 5 Rendering Section – Actually the entire draft spec is a good reference for anyone parsing or rendering HTML.  Since EditLive! does both this is likely to be useful.

Factors That Improve Online Experiences – Interesting research on how user’s navigate web sites and the misconceptions designers have about how usable their sites are.

Replacement iPhone Earphones Review – since my standard set seem to be dying this looks handy.

Google Mobwrite – Interesting looking JavaScript real-time collaborative editing implementation. The theory section is particularly worth studying.

How To Unlock the Huawei E220 HSDPA modem – can’t really see that I’ll need to use this, but useful to know it’s possible.

VMWare Web Access Can’t Login After Upgrading to Debian Lenny

This one should be obvious but well, it wasn’t… When you upgrade to the latest Debian stable (Lenny at time of writing which was released 14 Feb 2009), it will upgrade PAM and a few other really important login-type modules.  At the time it will tell you that you have to restart any services that use PAM or they mightn’t authenticate properly and offer to restart a number of services for you so everything seems happy.

Sadly, since VMWare isn’t installed as a Debian package, it’s not included in that list of services to reboot so it will suddenly stop allowing you to log in. The fix is to simply restart the vmware management services:

sudo /etc/init.d/vmware-mgmt restart

This won’t restart your VMs, just the web access and other management components. You can now log in to the web access console using the appropriate OS accounts (by default I think only root is enabled).