SAS on 64b Ubuntu Linux

This was contributed by a colleague from UCI, Harry Mangalam.

Having spent 3 days debugging this, I thought I might make it easier
for others who might run into it.

SAS 9.2 uses Java for at least some of its plotting routines
(minimally the ‘ods graphics’).

The 64b version of SAS still uses the 32b version of Java and
officially only supports SUSE and RHEL as a platform. For a variety
of reasons, I run it on Ubuntu Intrepid, which meant that I got a
flurry of "we do not support that platform’ replies from SAS
technical support when I tried to figure out why it was failing
with “ERROR: Cannot load Java Runtime Engine”

The short version is that in order to support the 32b version of Java,
the 32b compatibility libs are required. You can install them on a
Ubuntu platform with:

sudo apt-get install apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-sun-java5-bin\
sun-java5-jre libc6-i386 lib32gcc1 lib32z1 lib32stdc++6 lib32asound2\
lib32ncurses5

(if you’re going to use a direct-from-Sun JRE, omit the packages
with ‘java’ in the names.).

I installed Sun’s latest 1.5 JRE (jre1.5.0_21) in the same SAS root as
their supplied JRE (jre1.5.0_12). It seemed to work with SAS’s JRE,
but it threw a few “Locking assertion failure” errors. Using Sun’s
JRE, it ran without errors.

It also needs the environment vars set to tell SAS where to find
things:

# convenience shortcutexport SASPATH=/where/you/rooted/SAS-x86_64/9.2# following is required to allow 32bit java to find its libs; may vary# with your installationexport LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${SASPATH}/jre1.5.0_21/lib/i386:\${SASPATH}/jre1.5.0_21/lib/i386/server:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}# Need to set the CLASSPATH to the JRE root so when SAS calls java,the right one is executed.export JAVAHOME=${SASPATH}/jre1.5.0_21/

SAS tech support spent 3 days insisting that it was the wrong Java
sub-version number that was the problem.

—
Harry Mangalam – Research Computing, NACS, UC Irvine