Installation on a Linux system

5 Installing Eloquence on the Linux platform

Installation on a Linux system

This document provides installation instructions for Eloquence on the Linux Platform. You can obtain Linux support by contacting Marxmeier Software AG at eloq-support@msede.com.

Hardware requirements

In order to run Eloquence, your hardware should fulfil the following minimum requirements:

Processor: Intel Pentium processor or compatible.
RAM: You should have installed at least 16 MB of memory. When using X11, 32 MB are recommended. While it should work with less memory it may be slow.
Disk space: About 20 MB for the Eloquence software
Network card: Eloquence requires that a network card is installed as eth0.

System requirements

Eloquence on the Linux platform has been tested with the 2.0.29 kernel. As far as we can see, any 2.0.x kernel should work as Eloquence does not depend on specific kernel features.

Probably more important are the shared library revisions (as they are usually not backwards compatible). Eloquence has been linked against the following shared libraries:

   libncurses.so.3.0 => /lib/libncurses.so.3.0
   libg++.so.27 => /usr/lib/libg++.so.27.2.1
   libstdc++.so.27 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.27.2.1
   libm.so.5 => /lib/libm.so.5.0.9
   libc.so.5 => /lib/libc.so.5.4.33

If you are encountering segment violations or core dumps when using Eloquence on Linux you should verify that you have installed compatible shared library versions on your system. Either obtain the libararies from your Linux distribution vendor (eg. RedHat, Caldera, SuSE etc.) or download them from your next sunsite mirror (eg. on sunsite http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/GCC).

Compatibility

The Linux Version should be fully compatible to the HP-UX version with the following exceptions:

The eloq program (providing virtual terminals - aka. TASKS) is currently not available on Linux. The Linux kernel does not support the ioctl() functions we use to communicate with ptys.
There is no Motif Dialog Driver available on Linux. The Linux version is currently limited to forms and ASCII dlg. However, you can use Linux as a server for Windows PCs using graphical dialogs.
The Intel processors have a different byte order than PA-RISC processors. This may affect you when you access a packed buffer (eg. DBINFO or DBGET) because Eloquence builds them in the order which is native to the underlying system (PACK/UNPACK USING and IN DATA SET takes care of it). However if you unpack buffers manually, you have to take care of the different byte order.
On HP-UX, the HP-Roman8 character set encoding is usually used (and Eloquence internally uses it for backards compatibility). Please be aware, that with Linux the ISO8859-1 character set encoding is usually used. Files written by Eloquence may need to be converted if used outside Eloquence. You can use GNU recode to convert files.
The Linux utilities are a different from HP-UX. For example: Linux uses the BSD printing system (lpr) instead of the SYSV one (lp). So any program which uses lp or lpstat directly needs some minor adaption. In addition all modifications which were made to printer interface files must be adapted to lpr filters.
The Eloquence terminal adaption of the Linux console does not support underline. This is a limitation of the Linux console driver.
The following X11 based terminal emulators have been tried:

rxvt: (version 2.18) works with TERM=dtterm
xterm: works partially (no line drawing) with TERM=dtterm
dtterm: dtterm is part of the CDE 1.1 product which is available for Linux from either RedHat/TriTeal or Xig.

Eloquence Installation and Configuration - 19 DEC 2002