LiveCycle Data Services / amd64 / ubuntu

I haven't tried out the alternative - BlazeDS - yet, but I've had the time of my life trying to get ubuntu to use all my RAM and both my monitors, and even more fun trying to get LCDS installed. Nothing has been exceptionally difficult, but I've noticed a lot of things just are not compatible. Knowing not only where you're going, but also the route to get there, can make a major difference in total time taken. That's why I document my "mistakes" - for next time. Next time...

1. Well, maybe next time I'll get Hyper-V Server 2008 to work. Even VMWare ESXi wasn't happy with my SCSI drives. Xen looked like more than I was prepared to bite off, nevermind chew.


2. Accessing any more than 3GB of physical RAM on an ubuntu install requires the amd64 package. Similar limits are imposed on other 32 bit operating systems. In this case I chose to upgrade to the 64 bit version than enable PAE.


3. to do anything useful in an unfamiliar operating system you'll want to use the desktop version.


4. the graphics driver and operating system seemed to fight like small children if the driver's not open source ... I'm just glad that nVidia have made the effort for a 64 bit driver so I can see my desktop in TwinView, rather than being forced to run the server version (see 3).


5. the Flash plugin that you can download from Adobe's website is - at time of writing - only compatible with i386 and not amd64. Problem's easily solved by using sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree which was already set up inside Aptitude.


6. when you download a .bin file, you're expected to know you're going to chmod +x and execute it. However, in the case of lcds261-lin.bin you can't just do this inside a terminal from the CTRL-ALT-F7 session; you must run it from one of the CTRL-ALT-F{2..6} sessions. Else you'll get a Java error java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Can't load library: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/amd64/xawt/libmawt.so. Amusingly, one of the lines in the stack trace read: at ZeroGay.a(DashoA10*..)


7. even if you asked the installer for a Tomcat install, don't expect your container to be started when installation is complete. Perhaps it's too much to expect a reasonable error message too. Anyway, I created a new service account user "tomcat" with sudo adduser tomcat and then gave it ownership of the (otherwise locked down) Tomcat install directory and started the server.


8. Actually check that the samples are working - front-to-back - at this point. First time around, I celebrated an early victory when I first saw the sample pages running inside Tomcat. There was a leeeettle bit more setup to do re: the sample database. The LCDS install ships with an HSQLDB database, which needs write permission on a bunch of directories. In the spirit of the previous step (and, perhaps, a pre-existing condition in which I derive pleasure from creating new service accounts) I created a new user called hsqldb with permission to create the .lck (lock) files. sudo adduser hsqldb and then /opt/lcds/sampledb$ sudo chown -R hsqldb .


9. LCDS is free under Adobe's developer license on more than 1 CPU (or even in production environments, but only on a single CPU). This is great for developers like me who can tinker at home without parting with hard cash. We can even demo our applications to clients for free. The people with the cheque books can keep them in their pockets until bigger test and production environments are commissioned.