My first post, which will show my knowledge level of Linux at 0%

I was recently assigned the task of tracking 3rd party software installations for my group. A request came in for the following items to be installed on Red Hat 5.0:

01 - Oracle 9i client
02 - Oracle 10g client
03 - Sybase 12.5 client
04 - Sybase 15.0 client
05 - DB2 8.1 client
06 - MQ Series 6.0 client and server
07 - IBM Java SDK 1.42
08 - IBM Java SDK 1.50
09 - WebLogic 9.0 with workshop
10 - DataDirect ODBC 5.1
11 - Borland Enterprise Server Visiobroker 6.5

I need to determine if each of these are supported on RHEL5, but I could not find the information on the Red Hat web site. Can anyone help point me in the right direction for finding this information out?

Thanks in advance!

You'd have to find out from the people that make the products (e.g. Oracle for the Oracle components).

There ARE Oracle products that run on Linux (usually on RHEL) because Oracle bought into supporting open source platforms a few years back.

The "IBM JAVA" throws me. Java comes from Sun and is certainly installable on RHEL. If there is some customized Java distribution from IBM I'm unaware of it and would think it would violate the rules for Java. So far as I know only M$ ever willingly tried to do that.

However, IBM also bought into supporting open source platforms a while back so I imagine their products (such as MQ Series) run on some Linux and if so likely on RHEL as the larger installed base of the two main commercial Linux Distros (Suse being the other).

Your question though said "supported" which is a key question. Even with recently installed Oracle EBusiness 12 they were only showing "support" for up to RHEL 4.

This doesn't mean it doesn't "run" but simply that it isn't "certified" as a platform. Vendors use this distinction as a get out of jail free card. They will try to assist you sometimes but if you get in very deep they'll say "it's an unsupported configuration". You can usually still get them to work by saying "how would it work if it WERE on the supported version" though they'll resist that.

We just recently installed that same Ebusiness 12 on FC 6 which completely unsupported because it is A) Fedora Core rather than RHEL and B) Release 6 rather than release 4. Despite all that we got it "running" just fine. Why? Because FC and RHEL are essentially the same thing (FC serves as beta for what ends up in RHEL) and the difference between 4 and 6 is mainly updated versions of packages including the kernel but it's not a major change - both have 2.6 kernels. Going from RHEL 3 to RHEL 4 though would be a major change because the former was based on the 2.4 kernel.

So the question is are you looking for a "certified" solution or one that will "run". Often for the former you'll find you have to go to a very out of date version of OS to get commonality. Also sometimes (assuming you mean to put all this on the same server) you can't get a "certified" solution because the app versions you're using are not certified for each other. (e.g. Maybe you can use MQ Series 5 for Oracle 9i but not with Oracle 10g). Usually I just look to make sure I'm at or above the level that is certified.