The setup for the build environment takes a few steps. First of all, you want to make sure you have the JDK from blackdown.org. It can be obtained by visiting http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux.html, and choosing to "Download the JDK for Linux." Follow the installation instructions in Blackdown's documentation. You want to make sure that you get the jdk 1.1.7, and not 1.2. Installing VisiBroker for Java on Linux is a little more complicated. The problem is that VisiBroker has an executable called "osagent" that must be running in order to fully operate the ORB. Unfortunately, there is as of yet no "official" Linux port of VisiBroker for Java, and thus no ELF binary of osagent that runs on Linux natively. If you'd like to let the folks at Inprise know how nice it would be to have a pure Linux port of their product, Inprise suggests you send email to the following email address: pjonusaitis@inprise.com. For now, however, you must run the osagent under one of their supported platforms, which includes Windows, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, Digital Unix and IRIX, but not Linux. Therefore, you can do all your VisiBroker for Java development on Linux and run all your CORBA applications on linux machines, but you have to run osagent on a supported platform. This leads us to several options, one of which we'll describe here here. Among your options are: 1. Use a network, with a minimum of 1 Linux Box (any flavor) and one other machine that is running either Windows (any flavor), Solaris, HPUX, AIX, or IRIX. All your development and execution will be done on the linux box, but the "other" machine will run osagent. 2. Use Wine for Linux to run osagent directly on the Linux box. See http://www.winehq.com/ for more information on downloading, installation, and setup. This option would not require a network, but would require obtaining and configuring Wine. 3. Use vmware, and set up a virtual machine running Windows on your Linux box, and run osagent within the Windows virtual machine. Check them out at http://www.vmware.com/. This option would not require a physical network (it utilizes a virtual network address in the VM), but would require installing vmware and configuring the VM and then installing a Windows operating system into the VM, such as Windows 95/98 or NT. For our discussion here, we have chosen the first option. We will use a small network consisting simply of a single Linux box and a single Windows 95 box (a typical small home network). We will install VisiBroker for Java on the Windows 95 machine, and then "port" it over (mainly the .jar files) to the Linux box. If you are using another box with other than Windows, just substitute that OS for Windows in the instructions below. First, make sure you have installed the JDK from Blackdown, as mentioned above. Next, download the 60-day trial version of VisiBroker for Java for Windows from Inprise, by going to http://www.inprise.com/visibroker/download/, and choosing to download VisiBroker for Java for Windows (or whatever your second "official" box is going to be). As of the time of this writing, version 3.4 is available for Windows. Install the jdk according to the instructions that accompany it. (Mark the page, becuase you may need to return to it and download the Solaris version as well, to get the vbroker/bin directory--see below). Now, you must install VisiBroker for Java onto the Windows box. You must do this for two reasons. One, we're going to be running osagent on the Windows box, since it's an executable not available for Linux. Secondly, the official installation process stamps the VisiBroker jar files with a license code that is necessary for the proper operation of the ORB. If these files are not installed properly, they will not run. Therefore, installation of VisiBroker onto a supported machine is a necessity, so that the jar files can be properly stamped. So, install VisiBroker into a directory (perhaps c:\vbroker) on the Windows machine. Then, copy the files from c:\vbroker to your linux box (say, under /opt/vbroker). You can do this in several different ways. Perhaps the easiest is to use Samba on the linux box to server up SMB drives for the Windows box. Another way is to use nfs to do the transfer (either running an nfs client on the Windows box or an nfs server on the Windows box). A third way is to zip up the entire vbroker directory structure, and ftp that tarball over to the linux box, and untar it into /opt/vbroker. However you choose to do it, you want to get the following directories over onto the linux box at a minimum (some of these are not strictly necessary, but they are nice to have): c:\vbroker\lib ===> /opt/vbroker/lib c:\vbroker\adm ===> /opt/vbroker/adm c:\vbroker\docs ===> /opt/vbroker/docs c:\vbroker\idl ===> /opt/vbroker/idl c:\vbroker\java_examples ===> /opt/vbroker/java_examples Your /opt/vbroker/lib will contain the license-stamped jar files for the VisiBroker ORB. Now, you still need an /opt/vbroker/bin directory. This is a little problematic, because you can't simply copy over the Windows c:\vbroker\bin directory, because it contains windows binaries, which will do you no good. So, your best bet is to download (yes, again) the Solaris port of the VisiBroker for Java 3.4, and extract it's /vbroker/bin directory from the tarball. The way to do that is as follows: 1. Download the Solaris VisiBroker 3.4 file called vbj34_sol.tar, from the Inprise web site, where you downloaded the Windows version earlier. 2. Create a directory called vbj34.sol, and change to that directory. 3. Untar the tarball: tar ../vbj34_sol.tar 4. Uncompress the files ending with .Z with this command: uncompress *.Z 5. Then, extract three of the files with the following commands: tar xvf vbcrdev.tar tar xvf vbcrrun.tar tar xvf vbgkrun.tar 6. Now, on you Linux machine, create a new bin directory under your /opt/vbroker directory where you copied all your files from the Windows installation. 7. Then, copy the contents of the vbj34.sol/bin directory to your target vbroker/bin directory, something like: cp vbj34.sol/bin/* /opt/vbroker/bin 8. After doing this, you should have the following files in your /opt/vbroker/bin directory: gatekeeper idl2java java2iiop oadutil printIOR vbj_convert gkconfig irep locserv osagent vbdebug vbjc idl2ir java2idl oadj osfind vbj vbver The only files among these that you will need to use for our example are idl2java, vbjc, and vbj. Read the README.bin.dir file, that's our description file for the ported bin directory. Note that some of these files, such as osagent and osfind, are Solaris binaries, so don't try and run them. Now, you should have the JDK1.1.7 installed, say in /usr/local/jdk117_v1a. You should also have copied over the VisiBroker directories listed above, say into /opt/vbroker. At this point, you want to make sure that (based on the above sample directories) you have the following setup: Your PATH should include the following: /usr/local/jdk117_v1a/bin /opt/vbroker/bin You can verify the above by typing the commands "which javac" and "which vbj". The javac should resolve to your jdk bin directory, and your vbj should resolve to your vbroker bin directory. Your CLASSPATH should include the following: /usr/local/jdk117_v1a/lib/classes.zip /opt/vbroker/lib/swingall.jar /opt/vbroker/lib/vbjtools.jar /opt/vbroker/lib/vbjapp.jar /opt/vbroker/lib/vbjorb.jar /opt/vbroker/lib/vbjcosnm.jar /opt/vbroker/lib/vbjcosev.jar Once you have the above set up, building the source is quite simple. Just download it and untar it into a new directory, and type "make". That will build the source. For instructions on how to run the application once built, see the README.run file.