[ts-gen] misc shim/java questions...

[R P Herrold]

On Sat, 24 Jul 2010, Vince Fulco wrote:

> I've done a clean install of centos 5 server + some other required
> packages.  Went thru the FAQ on installing sun java and after doing
> it, the required pathmunge in the profile and rebooting, I get the
> error "-bash: jar: command not found".   A 'which java' indicates it
> is installed in the right place '/usr/java/jre1.6.0_21/bin/java', at
> least I think so.  Is there something elementary that I am missing?
> Grubbing around the shim mailing list and web indicates a path issue.

Probably so --- the Java available within CentOS wea not 
sufficiently usable when the trading-shim project started, and 
so Sun's [actually, first IBM's which gave vary hard to 
detect variances, until we did som eside-by-side testing, and 
we dropped it] was 'written up' by me

but these days, I seem to be running with:

[herrold at centos-5 ~]$ which jar
/usr/bin/jar
[herrold at centos-5 ~]$ ls -al /usr/bin/jar
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Sep 16  2008 /usr/bin/jar -> /etc/alternatives/jar
[herrold at centos-5 ~]$ ls -al /etc/alternatives/jar
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 35 Feb  4  2009 /etc/alternatives/jar -> /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.4.2-gcj/bin/jar
[herrold at centos-5 ~]$ rpm -qf /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.4.2-gcj/bin/jar
java-1.4.2-gcj-compat-devel-1.4.2.0-40jpp.115
[herrold at centos-5 ~]$

[I tear down and rebuild machines from time to time and at 
some point did a rebuild from a package list initially 
satisfiable from CentOS alone, and a 'good enough' Java had 
been created, seemingly by the old jpackage.org folks -- that 
jpp suffix is their 'tag']

and so will need to tear down and follow the instructions I 
wrote long ago to see. I see you installed the JRE rather 
than the full JVM and I suspect that the 'developer's tool' 
'jar' may not be present there, but am just guessing presently

> Secondarily, it isn't entirely clear that I can run shim on a headless
> unit as it appears that one has to use GUI to config the IB TWS and
> run the GUI app before launching shim?

You are correct that running wholly headless is not doable, 
because the authentication parts, particularly with the OTP 
token, requires X (or at least some GUI display for the AWT) 
for mousing parts of the authentication sequence.

For development, of course, that data security part is not 
present, but still one has to manually key both the userid, 
and password credential parts.

So, yes, headless (in the sense of no X environment) is not 
directly possible in either production, nor development with 
the TWS IB provides --- but 'headless' in the sense of no 
monitor, and no displayed GUI environment, by the method of 
connecting to an Xvnc running in the framebuffer is perfectly 
possible

 	http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/VNC-Server

-- Russ herrold