Lucky me I was invited to participate in the alpha 2 for the next release of Adobes coldfusion server code named scorpio.

I only just started playing with it and even the alpha works like a charm with some very complex applications we have running here in our shop. A very nice suprise was seeing that a few nasty problems we had with CFMX 7 and PDF creation have already disappeared in the alpha. I LIKE.

So seeing I will be doing a fair bit of installing of CFMX in the next couple of weeks I thought now would  be a good time to post a small how-to on getting CFMX to play nice with Ubuntu. We have been developing CFMX 7 and Bluedragon applications on Ubuntu successfully for close to 9 months now so  from my experience everything works fine. However please keep in mind that Ubuntu is not a “supported” OS so your mileage may vary.

NOTE:
This how-to applies to development machine with a running x-server. A headless machine will not run CFMX with these instructions as some required X-Server libraries are missing that the server requires. If I ever bring a Ubuntu server into production with CFMX I will post the extra steps necessary.

HOW-TO:
This how to is bases on instructions found here:
http://www.howtoforge.com/coldfusion_installation_debian_sarge

First download the coldfusion server installation file for linux (coldfusion-702-lin.bin) from the adobe web site. http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=coldfusion&loc=en%5Fus


1)The downloaded file will not be executable to make it executable open a shell navigate to the location where you saved the file and make the file executable by running:

sudo chmod +x ./coldfusion-702-lin.bin

2)
The next step only applies if you are running Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)
Seems that there is a major bug in this version of Ubuntu with some C library and Java. The bug will prevent the CFMX installer from running, you will receive the following nasty error:



The best solution to this problem was posted by Kasp3r on this blog:
http://daveshuck.instantspot.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/10/26/Warning-to-early-adopters-Ubuntu-Edgy-Eft-vs-ColdFusion-Installer

Within the installer there is a instruction (export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL) which causes the bug to occur, this problem has been reported in several products other than coldfusion. The solution is to uncomment this code within the installer. The downloaded CFMX installer despite it's name (coldfusion-702-lin.bin) is a text file. The following commands uncomment all occurences of  export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL within the installer, allowing CFMX to be installed on Edgy Eft.

cp coldfusion.bin coldfusion.bin.bak

cat coldfusion.bin.bak | sed "s/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/" > coldfusion.bin

3.
Install libraries needed by the CFMX installer.
sudo apt-get install libstdc++6 libstdc++5 libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2

I had an issue getting web services to run to fix this problem I had to create a symbolic link:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2

4)
All pre-requisites for installing CFMX have now been met, just run the installer and follow the instructions. (More infos with screenshots can be found on the debian how-to).

sudo ./coldfusion.bin

Hope this works for you people out theire if you need a hand just give me a quick shout.

cheers

Marcel