I am wondering what the story is for Baan on Linux? I have heard rumours about people working on a portingset for Limux but how much of that is true? Is it an 'official' project within Baan that will be part of their future product/platform strategy? Or is it a solo-venture of a a couple of developers?

I hope Baan is driving this with the aim of providing a full fledged Baan version on Linux one day. With Compaq discontinuing the Alpha architecture, Intel Itanium and sucessors will gain momentum and enable Linux to become an even more powerful player on the market. It would be a shame if Baan is going the miss that train.

There is a portingset for Baan IV on Linux since more than a year. But this was never released. Upto now, there are no informations, whether Linux will be supported in the future.

Gerhard,

If you say never released, do you mean nobody can get it? Or do you need to know the right people?

I would say that the Linux porting set is similar to the CE client. There was always a rumour that Baan were working on a client for CE and other handhelds, but as of yet, I have never seen any these items available on the public market.

I am sure that in the hallowed corridors of many Baan Towers, there are many ideas about getting Baan to work on many systems, however... you have to remember that the DB still has to be working in the background.. Anyone know of a MSSQL version that runs in Linux or want to put sales orders on over WAP?

MSSQL? Urgh.. Let's stick to Oracle and Informix, both products run nicely on Linux. And who knows there might be future support for MySQL :)

I know that those two products run nicely, but Baan cannot be seen of as wanting to remove a possible sales lead. Remember, that Microsoft were once rumoured to be interested in buying Baan.

I think that there has to be a customer overturn to see a change. When I installed Baan IV c the first time, it was one of the first NT installations in the UK. It was a major risk at the time as no-one could help us with the install (the guy who installed it had done it loads of times, just never outside a training room) and it took us about 3 weeks of fiddling with NT and Informix to get it working. Now an NT installation can be done in a few hours with no problems at all..... The more people moving to Linux and asking will force Baan's hand.

When I was on Baan, we talked once to the guy that has the portingset running on Linux.
He mention that he adapted/compiled it for linux as part-time, just for fun, but Baan officially did not supported it, not even a ba6.1 client (that would be also nice).
Of course that we tried to convince him to send us the portingset, unsuccesfully I may say :D

Now that is a perfect example of someone who really should get out more.... !:p

One of that colleagues is a Startrek fan but he moved to the "dark side", not the guy that had the portingset (a "PEG" guy) :p

What is PEG?

Please Exterminate Generously?

PEG are the Baan development guys -

Patch Extra Grief?

I think Programming Engineering Group...

Product Engineering Group?

no doubt Gerhard will let us know

I do wish that these TLA (Three Letter Acronyms) would not be so prolific in this industry. Its bad enough keeping up with the normal terms for someone to start calling themselves something new.

In the end we'll all start talking in NSA (No Sense Acronyms) that CTH (Confuse The Hell) out of ATU (All The Users) of this CPS (Confusing Pieceof Software, yeah I know, but I had to resist the temptation!)

:(

Originally posted by Jaason
Product Engineering Group?

no doubt Gerhard will let us know

You are right, Jaason.

This portingset really exists. At least one of my consultants runs Baan IV on a private PC at home on Linux.

Well finally the truth has emerged, Baan does run on Linux!

Is this portingset top secret Gerhard, or would it be possible to share it with interested Baan fans?

You're all quite right. The portingset does exist and it was never officially released but ...

I got the portingset here at home.
I received it from a guy at Baan at the time I was still working for VBS.
It only has an oracle driver I think.

I never got around to experiment with it, maybe some time in the future.

If anyone can get me the client for CE, I'm willing to send the linux portingset to him.

CU,
PV Ramone

I don't have the portingset for CE. Would you be prepared to send the portingset to me anyway?

When I was still with Baan The Product Release group acknowledged that there was a porting set for Baan that development in the Netherlands. They however at that time refused to release it . This is something I have been trying to get my hands on for 2 years and have chased many leads to no avail. If Anyone has this please let me know I would Love to get my habds on it for some testing.

Just talked to a freind in Baan Support and he says that he has heard nothing more on the Linux porting set from what we had both found out 18 months ago. I also put a request into baan for this and have had no reply. HE did say it is rumered that on the baan IV install tape there is an option for some intel based unix that will work with linux though. He has not tested this and does not know if it is true.

That must be the SCO/Unixware binary set.

I am going to try it on Redhat today. I think I have a Suse and Slackware server loaded up as well will test on those later this week and let you know. I have another buddy in consulting group that is on "Special Projects" I am checking with him also to see what he knows on this subject

You have to love that term, makes it sounds like he can't tell you what he's working on unless he kills you afterwards.

Imagine a daily team briefing...

''Okay guys, you'll be working on the hrm, and you'll be on the, you know, and you guys are working on the thing... And remember guys, lets be silent out there.'

And somewhere, there is bound to be a copy of Quake or Doom on the server.

Truth be known you never know what the heck they are working on last I knew it was integrating baan with some VCR movie rental vending machine for a customer

Why is it that sounds a great idea? I mean, all I need is the number and a machine and I could get loads of free movies by messing about in tools... Cool! However, the gui would not look as nice on a LED scroller

HP today announced that they will be shipping servers with a secure version of Linux on board. This will come at a cost above normal Linux but cheaper than Unix.

So if someone can now work on the Linux porting set, I see a new hybrid appearing in the next year or so.....

The future is coming and it may not be bright (but it could be penguin formed)

You are too much of an NT geek :)

Me a geek..... Now Now, although it never did Bill Gates any harm, I think I am quite far from that remark thank you


*Runs off to hide in his anorak*

well I tried the Unixware port lastnight on redhat linux.................................POOF SMOKE. Didnt work.

So it is standard Baan functionality!

I think that you would need to have some sort of binary translator for that to work... I was envolved with this a long time ago, and packerma is the one that can help us with this... Let's hope he will have a look at this forum :)

_______________________ UPDATE

Just got an email from him saying:

It was unixware7.0! Works fine.
I had it running under linux with a sco portingset and sco emulation ibcs under linux.
The only problem are the pty's! For some reason it can not handle the pty's properly. May if you can tune the pty's under linux to a more sco/unixware like way it may works!


So, try it using the binary translator (ibcs) and let us know if it works! :rolleyes:

Do you guys realise that if you can get the porting set working, there will be a reasonable option to build a Linux / Baan server for the first time as a commercial solution...

I guess that we will see the first one in Q2 2002.

I know thats what I have been striving to do for 2 years

We are running our productive Baan-System on UnixWare 2 and UnixWare 7. Works fine, stable and extreme fast. We have set up a test system with the Linux Portingset on SuSE 7.2. Works fine too. The Portingset for Linux is an extra Portingset, it´s NOT the Portingset for UnixWare.

Dieter

Hi Dieter,

Any chance you would like to share this portingset with some of us? :)

I can send out the UW Portingset to you :-)

As you might know Baan says that a Linux Portingset is not existing. A "castle in the air" could not be distributed :-)
I get this Linux Portingset from a friend and I am not allowed to distribute it. I have an information that there is an e-mail address where you can get it. It´s "linuxdemand@baan.com"

Dieter

hi Dieter,

Thanks for the info, I will try my luck with the email address you gave me!

Forgot to mention that we did not tried to run the installation on linux. We had Unixware (or True64?) Baan installation, so we copied over everything (we were using TBASE) to the linux machine and then replaced the portingset...

Anyone brave to do a installation from scratch, by untaring/uncompressing the SCO portingset into the installation directories and see if it works?

Tried it with the Install yeasterday.............POOF SMOKE. Now you tell me you copied it over and moved the porting set into place. I have another angle I am trying today will let you know how it goes

The SCO Portingset will not work on Linux as far as I know. The Linux Portingset can be installed from scratch ! It´s painless !


Dieter

I do have baan on linux running now. But I am having a tbase error any help would be appreciated


tbase6.1 R r /baan/bse/dict/tttaad/taad200000

File: /baan/bse/dict/tttaad/taad200000
tbase6.1: could not read index description:
File: /baan/bse/dict/tttaad/taad200000 error iserrno 22

bdbpre6.1 -r -dbisam -Nttaad200 -C000 >ttaad200.dmp
rm -f $BSE/dict/tttaad/taad200000.*
bdbpost6.1 -nmf < ttaad200.dmp

#The option "-r" lets the bdbpre6.1 read only the datafile, ignoring the index completely.

When I worked at Baan I came accross to solutions for Linux.

One was running Baan on Linux (early 98!) using one of Linux's emulation modes to support software for other i386 based Unix flavors like SCO (ibcs).

The other one was the same as Gerard mentioned, Baan engineers in Holland that run it at home. You won't see a public release until there is enough demand. Baan customers I visited during my time at Baan were usually the smaller midmarket (NT dominant) or the bigger (Unix esp. HP and Solaris) users.

Linux could play in the midmarket as well, but larger ERP implementations will probably stick to more mature Unix versions.

One of the reasons I left Baan was the fact that everything turned into MS code based apps. E-Enterprise on MS SiteServer and SQL Server, MS based addons etc. I now jumped over to the Java, J2EE, Linux, Open Source world... what a refreshment, but I do agree that OS needs are based on specific user requirements, Baan runs fairly well on NT and SQL 2000 with Baan is not a bad combo at all.

WAP and Baan? Shouldn't be a big issue. You can use Baan's ConnectionKit BCK (free) or the more recent BaanOpenWorld (60k+) and integrate with Baan using Java and put a simple application together on a Java2 Enteprise server producint WAP pages.

Arean

Oops, sorry I didn't notice I wasn't on the end of the message thread when posting my reply, I see there is a way more about Baan on Linux :-)

Is it possible to post the zipped version somewhere? I bet it is still 50mb+....

By the way all other versions are freely downloadable from:

ftp.support.baan.com/updates/port

so you don't have to send them around :-)

Arean.

What is it you watn to post? A Linux Port? If so e-mail me and I will set up a ftp site for this thread

I had a look in my old cd-roms and disks. Guess what I found ...

The portingset is about 17 Mb and the file is called BAAN_61C03LINUXI386TAR.GZ

If you can let me know the coordinates for an ftp site to place it on, I'll transfer it to you.

I think Scott Vandenhout (svandenh) is willing to make the porting set available via FTP. Unfortunately we cannot do the same thing on this site, so please talk to him about it.

I have it............however I have yet to get tbase to work. If anyone is interested let me know and I am sure we can work something out

Hi,

couldn't we use Oracle's linux edition to work with Baan's driver? At least we can get the system installed without having to worry about TBase.

Is this portingset maintained regularly by Baan? In other words, is it up to date with the other portingsets for NT and Unix?

:rolleyes:

Nope, the developpers are not working on it at all.
The existing release was the home playground of one of them and it is not endorsed by Baan and has not been tested by PEG (development).

Hi,

Do you still have this file... I am very interested...
I mean this Baan Portingset for Linux
My private mail is
:eek:

At one point Baan was publishing an
official glossery of TLA's

it was just just 3 or 4 pages, I would post it,
but I don't have it anymore.

J

Gerhard, could give me more information .... Look on your exchange contact ...

There are some rumours at the moment, that Baan will officially support Linux within the first quarter of 2002. :cool:

Originally posted by Gerhard
There are some rumours at the moment, that Baan will officially support Linux within the first quarter of 2002. :cool:

It seems that this not longer a rumor. Here you can find the official announcement (January 14th, 2002):

http://www.crn.com/Sections/BreakingNews/dailyarchives.asp?ArticleID=32537

Here is a qoute: "We will have a very, very big initiative for Linux and Linux support by the end of this quarter,"
This quote is from Don Brower, vice president of product marketing and strategic alliances for Baan

Here we go ...

Dieter:)

Wow, this is excellent!!! If Baan does it right on Linux, then they could get into a market that is becoming more and more important.

Would be even more interesting if they would also consider supporting open source databases like SAP DB or PostgreSQL. That would make Baan a more affordable solution at the entry level. There would be a bit of irony in using SAP's relational database for the back-end with Baan, no? ;)

SAP DB? Eeww, no thank you. Let's stick to Postgres and MySQL :)

"We will have a very, very big initiative for Linux and Linux support by the end of this quarter,"

I didn't get any positive feedback from within PEG, so maybe this is just the frontend for the iBaan, still requiring BaanIV/ERP to run on a commercial UX/NT...

It is possible that PEG has it wrong in this case. Brower's quote from the crn article speaks about, more as one application:

"In addition, the company plans to announce Linux versions of its applications within the next few weeks. Baan currently supports Unix, OS/400 and Windows NT on the server. "We will have a very, very big initiative for Linux and Linux support by the end of this quarter," Brower said."

In this context you would not expect that we are only expecting BaanCRM on Linux, you would hope for a little more then that.

At the autumn Baan Users UK & Ireland User Group conference on Tuesday 12th November there was a slide showing future releases for Baan IVc4 and BaanERP 5.0c.

I can't remember any major additions to the Baan IVc4 area, but for Baan 5.0c a Linux Porting set was present!! This is good news!

Phil

Confirm that. The Porting set for Unix is on going ...

Is it possible to get the portingset for Linux ? what is the FTP site you were talking about ??

thanks :)
Ranias