RTC and FreeBSD?
2 answers
As Chris points out, FreeBSD is not a supported platform for RTC. In fact it's not even a supported platform for Eclipse on which the RTC client is built. This is somewhat problematic given that Eclipse UI is built with SWT which is a JNI for native UI widgets. In brief, no SWT, no Eclipse, no RTC. (Furthermore, on most systems, SWT uses GTK as it's native widget library, so no GTK, no SWT etc.)
However, it is open source and the FreeBSD has it's own packaging for eclipse If you use the FreeBSD package, which by default gives you 3.6.2 it is then possible to use the p2 installer zip for RTC.
My steps were:
- Install FreeBSD
- Install and configure xorg and gnome2
- Install and configure openjdk6
- Install eclipse
- Download p2 repository zip for RTC
- Launch eclipse and use Help > Install new software... to install RTC from the p2 repository zip
Update:
From one-on-one discussion with Chris it seems that there are a handful of SCM operation that need native library support that will not work on an unsupported platform:
RTC SCM has the capability of storing symbolic links as versionables. Also it does certain sanity checks on a sandbox before using it. These are done with native libraries that have to be compiled for every OS and processor architecture we support.
So you would be in an unsupported world with some missing functionality. I was able to verify that a some normal user workflows are functional: share project, create checkin and deliver changes, work item creation, association of work item with changes, resolution of work items.
It might be easier to support your client on Linux, possibly in a virtual machine.
FreeBSD is not on the list of support client platforms for RTC as of CLM 4.0.
It looks like FreeBSD does not come with a GUI as part of its standard install so you might be looking at a command-line tool: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=25359
Provided that you have a working Java VM on the FreeBSD system you might be able to try the scm CLI for Linux to somewhat work on the platform. Note that the CLI only support scm related functionality so there's nothing for workitems, build, process, reporting, etc. Certain things like workitems are available from the web interface on the server.
When using the SCM CLI on an unsupported platform you will need to modify the scm.sh and lscm scripts to point to your Java install, remove any -X* parameters that are specific to IBM VM and set an appropriate maximum heap size (-Xmx...). Also, you'll need to change the SCM_DAEMON_PATH in the lscm script to point to scm.sh and not the Linux scm binary.
Note that there will be no support for loading symbolic links or for auto-merge (of conflicts) as these are handled by certain native binaries. Also, it's uncertain if there could be problems with the filesystem locking so you would want to avoid using multiple sandboxes or an NFS-mounted home directory in your case.
It looks like FreeBSD does not come with a GUI as part of its standard install so you might be looking at a command-line tool: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=25359
Provided that you have a working Java VM on the FreeBSD system you might be able to try the scm CLI for Linux to somewhat work on the platform. Note that the CLI only support scm related functionality so there's nothing for workitems, build, process, reporting, etc. Certain things like workitems are available from the web interface on the server.
When using the SCM CLI on an unsupported platform you will need to modify the scm.sh and lscm scripts to point to your Java install, remove any -X* parameters that are specific to IBM VM and set an appropriate maximum heap size (-Xmx...). Also, you'll need to change the SCM_DAEMON_PATH in the lscm script to point to scm.sh and not the Linux scm binary.
Note that there will be no support for loading symbolic links or for auto-merge (of conflicts) as these are handled by certain native binaries. Also, it's uncertain if there could be problems with the filesystem locking so you would want to avoid using multiple sandboxes or an NFS-mounted home directory in your case.
