Getting IBM Bootable Media Creator to run on Ubuntu 12.04

Little update to my previous article on getting BoMC to run on Ubuntu. The Bootable Media Creator allows you to make an iso file with the latest IBM firmware on it, so you can keep everything up to date. You can get the BoMC here.

After trying again with a new install of Ubuntu, I noticed it didn’t quite work the same way. Before all I needed to do is create a /etc/redhat-release file and just run the thing.

With this version, doing the same thing resulted in this error:

/ibm_utl.bin
Extracting...
Executing...

./linmain.sh: 2: ./linmain.sh: source: not found
cp: cannot stat `SYSTEM_SUPPORT_LIST_.xml': No such file or directory
locale: unknown name "="

It still runs but the list of systems in the UI comes out blank, and so it is unusable.

To get this to work:
1. Unzip ibm_utl_bomc_9.40_rhel6_i386.bin to a temp directory.
2. Go sudo su to become root (sudo by itself doesn’t cut it).
3. BoMC uses a different ssl library, so install it by issuing

sudo apt-get install libssl0.9.8
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libssl.so.0.9.8 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libssl.so.10

I found that if I didn’t do this step, the application would appear to work, but would hang while trying to download anything.
4. Finally, run ./linmain.sh to start BoMC.