IBM iACS on Kubuntu 20.04

What’s new…

After many years of “i Access” (and many others of “Client Access“) on company MS Windows laptops, I’ve decided to try IBM i Access Client Solutions (or simply IBM iACS, #IBMiACS) on my own computer that, since more than 15 years, is powered by #Ubuntu. To be precise, lately I’m using #Kubuntu (20.04) but these are details related mainly to the windows manager ?

On Kubuntu 20.04

Required packages

After having downloaded and unpacked the zip file with iACS, before running IBM installer program I’ve had to add “dialog” package to my PC:

$ sudo aptitude install dialog

Basically, this should be the only package required (explicitly named in IBM instructions), however many more packages than in standard Ubuntu were already installed on my PC, as many of them are required for compiling those software packages that are not always available in their last (stable) from in available repositories: because of this, other packages could be needed in other Ubuntu installations, #YMMV ?

iACS installation

As clearly written in the instructions, the installer is inside the Linux_Application folder: just execute it (despite it accepts parameters),

sudo bash ./install_acs_64

AdoptOpenJDK 11

The problem after Ubuntu 18.04

When I first tried to use the functions of iACS, I discovered a problem which – in short – is related to Java and that appears to happen on Ubuntu versions greater than 18.04 : problem and solution are shortly described in the following page,

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1251215/ibm-i-access-client-solutions-not-working-with-ubuntu-19-10-and-20-04

AdoptOpenJDK installation

I followed the instructions for installing AdoptOpenJDK package from this page:

https://adoptopenjdk.net/installation.html#linux-pkg

This allows to add the required deb package for Java:

sudo aptitude install adoptopenjdk-11-hotspot

After this last intervention, Access Client Solution works perfectly!

Next step will be having a look at the newest enhancements to #IBMi and its #DB2fori introduced by the latest “Technology Refresh” – TRn – that #IBM has released ?

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