Dabbling With Mono/DB2

Sunday July 12, 2009

It's not confirmed but I think I've got H1N1 which is a human virus, not a computer one! It's just a nasty flu bug and has left me a bit groggy. So I'm currently probably taking twice as long to do something as normal..

I installed the latest Ubuntu (9.04) and Webmin on my 64 bit AMD box and started to install the free IBM DB2-Express-C database. The advantage of Ubuntu is that Mono comes installed. There's a slight road bump as I wanted to try ASP.NET MVC but the Mono team accidentally left that out of 2.4. They did an intermediate release of 2.4.2.1 last week to include it. So I'll have to install that as well.

Installing DB2 was a little more problematic (or maybe it was the Flu clogging my brain) as Java wasn't installed by default on Ubuntu. I used the Synaptic software manager to install Sun Java 6 but the DB2 Download Director didn't seem to work with that and I ended up downloading the 440MB (AMD 64 Linux version) by http which takes about 5 times as long. Then my Ubuntu was missing a couple of files. It's not hard to get by but you have to know how to issue Bash commands like sudo apt-get install from a terminal. The db2setup needed libstdc++.so.5 and libaio-dev. You need to do sudo apt-get install db2exc to fetch db2 then these commands to get the missing bits.

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5 sudo apt-get install libaio-dev sudo ./db2setup

I tracked down the dbstart command (it's in /sqllib/adm under your user directory so on my box its /home/david/sqllib/adm) but got this error: SQL1220N - The database manager shared memory set cannot be allocated. so I guess it's time to RTFM the IBM documents and the Redbook I mentioned before. If you know the answer, add a comment. My Linux box has 2GB of ram and 220 GB disk free so I doubt it's that!