Getting the IBM Bootable Media Creator (BoMC) to run on Ubuntu 10.04

IBM Bootable Media Creator (BoMC) is a nifty tool that will create a customized boot iso for installing drivers and firmware on your System x machines. You tell BoMC what hardware you are running and it goes out and downloads all the latest firmware, and then it wraps it up in an iso that you can boot from to update the hardware.

If you’d like to create your BoMC iso using Ubuntu , you might’ve noticed that BoMC doesn’t support it.

I’m on 10.04 and found that using the RHEL5 binary worked. At the time of writing, the name of the file is ibm_utl_bomc_3.00_rhel5_i386.bin . I tried the RHEL6 one first and it complained about a missing libssl library (libssl.so.10) so I would guess if you are on a newer version of Ubuntu, you should use this one instead.

You might see this error when executing it, and it will cause the downloads to fail

Can't find OS info file!


Simply execute this to create an Redhat release file at /etc/redhat-release , and this will make BoMC work.

sudo echo "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.0 (Santiago)" > /etc/redhat-release


Then simply execute it like this, put in your machine details, and out comes the iso:

sudo ./ibm_utl_bomc_3.00_rhel5_i386.bin