Dear all,

I recently installed Discovery Studio and Pipeline Pilot in an Ubuntu environment, and I thought I'd share my experiences. The version of Ubuntu that I used was 9.04.

Client side

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• Discovery Studio: There are a few packages that require installation which are not part of the default Ubuntu distribution. I had to additionally install the libstdc++5 and xvfb packages. This is easily done using a package manager like aptitude. At that point, one additional trick is required: Ubuntu uses dash for /bin/sh, which is not compatible with the shell scripts used by DS. This can be reconfigured by running the command: sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash. Answer the following question with 'No'. After this, the default DS installation runs through without any troubles!
  
• Pipeline Pilot: As we run an all Linux environment at our lab, installing the Pipeline Pilot client had us thinking for a while. In the end we solved it by installing VMWare Server (which is a free application) and creating Virtual Machines which run Windows XP. The Pipeline Pilot client runs fine on these virtual machines, no problems encountered yet. During our training course, I had 8 virtual machines running on a Linux workstation and the load on the machine never rose above 1...
  

Server Side

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• Discovery Studio+PP: I have not succeeded yet in successfully installing DS and PP on a Ubuntu server. After installing the packages mentioned above and changing the dash shell as described above, the installation runs through without any errors. I can also successfully start the server, and DS can successfully connect to it. However when I run a protocol, some library related errors appear:
  Can't load '/home/snabuurs/software/accelrys/pp/apps/scitegic/dscore/server/lib/libMdmDiscoveryScript.so' for module MdmDiscoveryScript: /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined symbol: FT_Select_Size at /home/snabuurs/software/accelrys/pp/apps/scitegic/core/packages_linux32/perl/perl-5.8.8/lib/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 230. at (eval 9) line 17
  I'm still looking into the libfontconfig library on Ubuntu to see if this can be fixed easily. For the time being we have the PP and DS servers running on a RH ES 5.2 server (which runs fine).
  

I hope this information will be useful if anybody tries or needs to install DS or PP on Ubuntu. And if any has some info on the libfontconfig error above, please let me know ;-)