Now that our Linux system is ready (for more information have a look at part 1 of this article) we can now move on to installing Business Objects XI 3.1. In this article, I won't go through the entire installation process since there aren't any significant differences to point out when compared to it's Windows counterpart. If you're interested in a complete reference on this particular aspect I would recommend you review the official documentation which is available on the sap marketplace:

https://websmp108.sap-ag.de/support

Instead I will focus more on a few basic operations an administrator must ensure to complete once the system has been installed.

So let’s get started with a few basic operations, for example;

• Add/Remove install products
• Start/stop database
• Start/stop Business Objects services
• Reconfigure CMS database
• Monitor BO services

In the Linux installation these operations are contained in shell scripts which are placed within the installation folder. In our case our installation folder is: /home/bobj. I will be using this as a reference for the rest of the article.

Add/Remove install products

/home/bobj/AddOrRemoveProducts.sh

This script will allow you to execute the installing process and add or remove components from your BO install.

Start/Stop database (only applicable for MySQL install)

/home/bobj/bobje/mysqlstartup.sh /home/bobj/bobje/mysqlshutdown.sh

These two scripts will allow you to control the status of the MySQL database for your installation.

Start/Stop Business Objects Services

/home/bobj/bobje/startservers.sh /home/bobj/bobje/stopservers.sh

The above scripts will allow you to control the status of the Business Objects services, namely CMS and the rest of the servers. You can also control the status of the Tomcat Web server with the following scripts:

/home/bobj/bobje/tomcatstartup.sh /home/bobj/bobje/tomcatshutdown.sh

Reconfigure CMS database

/home/bobj/bobje/cmsdbsetup.sh

With the above script you can reconfigure the database, the CMS repository and audit it is connecting to.

Manage Business Objects Services

/home/bobj/bobje/ccm.sh

With this script you will be able to do several operations by using the appropriate command line modifiers. You can get a full reference of operations by running the help modifer “ccm.sh –help”. Bear in mind that there are other actions you can perform with this script, such as:

• Start/Stop/Restart Server Intelligence Agent
• Start/Stop/Restart a managed server
• Enable/Disable a server
• To update all objects for a server

Monitoring the BO process

In addition to the actions performed by these scripts you can also monitor the state of your Business Objects service on the system by using other tools besides those included in Business Objects. An example of this is to apply the following command:

ps -Al

When the Business Objects service is running you will find it within this list under the following name “boe_cmsd”

Other Useful Resources

While installing Business Objects with Linux and managing the whole process, I came across a few configurations that are rather important I mention in this article, even though I will not get into too much detail:

Text Editing: If you are new to Linux, first try find the edit files mode that best suits you. There are several ways to do this either graphically or via command line. My suggestions for newcomers would be a graphical tool like Gedit. But if you feel more comfortable using a command line you can always count on a VI tool.

X server in root: Some tasks can only be executed in root. When using Red Hat, the graphical environment is disabled by default for root. This can make things a bit more complicated for non-advanced users. To enable the graphical environment in root, you can run the following command:

xhost local:root

So now you have a brand new Linux system with a full Business Objects installation up and running and you have also learnt the basic steps to managing it.

At this stage another question arises: how does this solution in Linux stand against the Windows? I will answer this question on the next and final article of this series.

For any questions about installing the Business Objects package in your Linux and on how to manage your system, leave a comment and I will reply to you as soon as possible.