I’ve recently been playing around with Fedora 8 as an environment for installing WAS while I work on certification. There were a couple of glitches that stumped me for a day or so, but since then it’s been working great.
The first problem was related to updates. I could run the launchpad application, but when I tried to run the WAS installer, it would crash and core dump. Eventually I found an article on devloperWorks talking about a similar problem installing DB2. The poster said that an update fixed his problem. Although Fedora was offering 140 updates, I didn’t want to spend the time installing them. I decided to go ahead and do that, and afterwards my core dump problem was fixed.
However, now the installer just quit without doing anything (or even showing an UI) rather than core dumping. A post by Kenny Smith suggested that there were some other packages that needed to be installed as documented in the manuals. I decided to read the installation manuals on the InfoCenter, and followed the instructions for RHEL5. Sure enough, there were four or five packages that were documented as being required that were not installed by default, so I went ahead and installed them. Lo and behold, the installer ran and installed WAS!
I guess the moral of the story is two-fold: 1) Install the updates that the system is offering. 2) Read the manual.