TWiki on AIX

Tips when installing TWiki 4.3.2 on an IBM AIX Version 5.3. and HTTPServer:

1. Don't use AIX's native TAR when extracting the TWiki .gz distribution (see: DoNotUseAIXtarUseGNUtarInstead)

2. Instead get the GNU tar. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/os/aix/linux/toolbox/alpha.html

3. Be sure to specify the path to the GNU tar binary when you extract. For example:

$ gunzip -dc TWiki-4.3.2.gz | /opt/freeware/bin/tar -xvf -

4. You will also need to grab the GNU grep from http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/os/aix/linux/toolbox/alpha.html as well. And change references to grep when setting up the configuration

5. Unless the "optional" Unicode::String Perl module is installed you may need to edit the twiki/lib/TWiki/Render.pm per Support.SID-00291 or you may get a Unicodepath error when 1st launching the TWiki, something like:

TWiki detected an internal error - please check your TWiki logs and webserver logs for more information. Can't locate Unicodepath in @INC (@INC contains: path . ..

This is the manual fix for it: Instead of fighting CPAN install you can manually patch the twiki/lib/TWiki/Render.pm file:

A. Remove this line:
use Unicode::String qw(utf8 latin1 utf16be);

B. Replace the following two lines:

    my $utf8AnchorName = Unicode::String->new($anchorName);
    $anchorName = $utf8AnchorName->substr(0, 32);
    with this line:
    $anchorName =~ s/^(.{32})(.*)$/$1/; # limit to 32 chars

6. When running the configure script, you may see CGI Setup --> Claims CGI user userid = root. However it does not appear that TWiki is running as root, see: Support.SID-00524 for more information.

7. Don't use the Perl that ships with the AIX, instead grab a recent stable Perl version, such as version 5.10.1

8. To get the twiki.conf file to be recognized it must be referenced from the hppd.conf file with a statement such as: Include conf/twiki.conf

9. You may need To Increase the Maximum Length of the Command Line or you may see "Could not perform search. Error was: exec failed: Arg list too long grep" search errors:

1. Determine the value of the ncargs attribute.
   lsattr -EH -l sys0 | grep ncargs
2. If the value of the ncargs attribute is less than 16 4-Kbyte blocks, increase the value to 16.
   chdev -l sys0 -a ncargs=16

Contributors: GregNeugebauer - 2009-10-09

Discussions

I am trying to Install Twiki on AIX 4.3.3.0 Apache 1.3.6 Perl 5.005_03

-- PabloClifton - 08 Jul 2003

I've installed TWiki 02 Sept 2004 on AIX 5.2. It just worked with no special work-arounds -- just a few oddities like diff's path: /usr/linux/bin. Most of the open source utils get installed to /usr/opt/freeware/bin, with links to /usr/bin.

I initially tried the Bull AIX Freeware versions of some of the pre-reqs, but I had trouble with Apache (sorry, I don't recall the exact problem). I ended up using RPMs from IBM. I already had PERL 5.8.0. I needed Apache 1.3.31, expat 1.95.7, rcs 5.7.2, and diffutils 2.8.1.

-- JosephThvedt - 28 Jan 2005

I've successfully upgraded to 4.0.1 with only a few missteps on the way. The upgrade script failed to upgrade a couple of .css files. That made pages look really ugly, particularly tables-of-contents, which were unreadable. There were also a handful of topics that gave me an RCS error if I try to edit them. I think this is the same as the problem described in DakarReleaseUpgradeGuide. I manually edited the ,v files to change what appears to be an owner field (was "root", now it's "nobody").

-- JosephThvedt - 14 Feb 2006

I've upgraded to TWiki 4.2 on AIX 5.3. It was mostly uneventful. Between my last TWiki upgrade and this one, both the hardware and the OS were replaced, and search hadn't been working properly. The TWiki upgrade motivated me to finally figure it out. I was using the AIX versions of egrep and fgrep, which do not work properly with TWiki. I installed the GNU versions, changed my SafeEnvPath to point to them, and all is well.

-- JosephThvedt - 30 Jun 2008

Thank you GregNeugebauer for sharing your installation tips with the TWiki community. I moved your tips to the top and refactored the text a bit.

-- PeterThoeny - 2009-09-12