Sunday, June 18, 2006

Unofficial TSM Clients for Linux - Debian

Hi all,

time-to-time I see on various forums questions about TSM client for Debian. IBM itself do not consider Debian being a supported platform, so they do not even plan to create the package. You can find several HOWTO's (mostly created using "alien" package converter) on the web, or you can install rpm and try to solve dependencies on your own.
As our environment is 95%+ Debian based, we created our own .deb package(s). We unpacked the rpm's (both API and BA), created new postinst scripts, sample configs etc. and packed it up in a single package.
Originaly we intended to use them for internal purposes only, but we think someone might find it usefull.

You can find the packages on http://www.adsm.org website - download section

Rules:
1) Package is not an official IBM release, Debian is not supported - use at your own risk
2) read the README ... really .....
3) if you have comment/suggestion/improvement - let me know


Harry

5 comments:

  1. Way to go Harry! I have seen a lot of requests for that, but one question...Isn't SUSE Debian based? If so wouldn't the SUSE packages work?

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  2. Hi Chad,

    no, SuSE is .rpm distibution (as RedHat, Mandrake etc.) - Debian uses .deb packages and has its own packaging system. Distributions based on Debian are all Ubuntu's and several others.

    You can of course install rpm package manager on Debian, but the problem is that Debian dependencies are based on packages, however .rpm dependencies are based on individual files. Moreover some libraries have diferent names etc.

    Harry

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  3. So what enterprise level Debian Servers are out there that offer support on the level of RedHat or SUSE? My experience with Ubuntu is that it is a superb desktop distro but is not geared toward Enterprise applications. I think this is what keeps IBM from distributing debian packages.

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  4. Well - Debian is community only developed - it has no company background like Redhat(Redhat) or SuSE (Novell). There are no desktop or server versions - just Debian :) Its main strength is that it is and always will be free. Main weakness is community-only based support.
    Do not want to go too deep here - see www.debian.org for more info
    Personally I find it excellent distro but understand that people can disagree (as always happens when comparing linux distro's :))))) )

    Harry

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  5. Do you plan to create a .deb-version of the new TSM client version 6.1? I would like that. :-)
    Best
    Daniel AJ

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