Creating VMWare Image for WebSphere Portal

In order to prepare for my WebSphere Portal Server 6.0 Admin Test, i thought first i will create a VMWare image and then i will use it for all my experiments without disturbing my Windows Machine Laptop setup. This allows me to try lot of things without going through uninstall/install cycle

I am following these steps for setting up the VMWare Image

1) Download the CentOs 5.2 VMWare Image from http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/. The CentOS is free and based on Red Hat Linux and it is very user friendly

2)After downloadig the VMWare Image unzip it on disk and start it. On the first startup it will ask you for initial setup things like timezone,..

3) Once the OS is started you can login using root/thoughtpolice password.

4) It will show you list of updates that are avilable for the CentOS, i decided to apply all the updates and restarted system.

One issue with CentOS is by default it has only 8 GB disk which is not sufficient for portal installation. So i used http://www.matttopper.com/?p=25 instructions in this article to add a new disk of 12 GB to a my Cent OS virtual machine. At this point also change the Memory size of the VMWare to 2 GB(You will need this when you try to apply fixpack to WPS). I also made changes in the .bashrc to add "ulimit -n 10240" line

Installing WPS

Note that you wont be able to use wizards for installing WebSphere Portal or applying WAS or WPS fix packs on CentOS 5, it keeps complaining about missing libraries. So i had to use -console option for installing WPS and then change response files and use them for installation. I like that approach now because the response files have nice description for each of the options and its good learning experience.

Preparing Cent OS for WPS

After Installing WPS i tried to install a sample portlet but whenever i used to go to Manage Portlets Portlet it was throwing some this cryptic exception[9/25/08 13:35:15:837 EDT] 00000044 ServletWrappe E SRVE0014E: Uncaught service() exception root cause /WEB-INF/jsp/html/webModuleList.jsp: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/ibm/psw/wcl/components/marquee/WMarqueeInitially i thought this might be because of some missing jars but it turns out that the OS is missing some packages so i had to follow these instructions

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r0/topic/com.ibm.websphere.express.doc/info/exp/ae/tins_linuxsetup_rhel5.html
If you want to install compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-61 package then executeyum install compat-libstdc++-33-3.2* command and CentOs takes care of downloading and installing the package