Running Sybase 12.5 ASE on Linux
This is for installing and running Sybase ASE 12.5 on a Fedora Core 1 box. The basic notes are derived from this Usenet posting. Basically, the tar ball and subsequent RPM from Sybase installs without too much of an issue. The main trick at this point is to set the shared memory max parameter for the kernel by adding “kernel.shmmax=some_reasonable_number” to /etc/sysctl.conf and then doing a “/sbin/sysctl -p”, where some_reasonable_number is, say, half of available RAM.
Java is required to get the setup program running. Use the latest JDK instead of what ships with the Sybase tarball; the shipped version doesn’t work. The setup choices are straightforward. Just ignore the “Incorrectly built binary which accesses errno or h_errno directly. Needs to be fixed.” messages that will appear on console as the dataserver and backup server start up. The license manager may not start because it’s pointing at the tarball’s JRE. Edit the lmgr script and point it at the right place.
To run isql (found in $SYBASE/OCS-12_5/bin), make sure the LANG environmental variable matches something in the $SYBASE/locales/locale.dat file. Setting LANG to ENGLISH works fine. Note that there’s a /usr/bin/isql, a part of the unixODBC package.
Note that Sybase doesn’t support dump loads across platforms, e.g., Solaris dumps loading into Linux, because of big endian vs. little endian issues. Note also that Sybase doesn’t have a trial version of 12.5 ASE for Solaris.