After spending the best part of an hour installing the latest OpenSolaris 2008.5 release, which I may add was straightforward and a massive improvement on previous releases (ZFS default filesystem - very cool!) I headed over to the IBM website to download DB2.
After spending the best part of 10 minutes navigating the website and filling in forms I found no sign of the Solaris x86_64 version of DB2 9.5 Enterprise, all I could find was the SPARC install.

Never mind I thought, the Express-C release will do for now and the documentation does say that DB2 Enterprise will run on Solaris x86_64 so I can upgrade later if needed (that is if I can find the install ).

Having downloaded and untarred the install files I ran the setup program db2setup only to be greeted with an empty command prompt. The Getting Started guide did mention this might happen so I proceeded to run the fix xset fp+ /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/TTbitmaps only to find TTbitmaps missing….

Frustrated with the lack of support for OpenSolaris and the BSD’s from both Oracle’s 11G database and IBM’s DB2 9.5 Enterprise, I resigned to the fact that I would have to leave playing with Solaris for another day and install Linux instead. Gentoo to the rescue!.

It’s been a while since the last Gentoo release and I have to admit I gave up waiting for a release about a year ago. It was my desire to roll with BSD that prompted me to wander over to the Gentoo website - if only out of curiousity. What a surprise it was to see a 2008.0 release, Gentoo may not be Unix but if you are a BSD fan it is similar enough to enjoy working with it. Portage rocks!.

Installation may not be the fastest and certainly isn’t the easiest, but it is the most rewarding in that you get to watch your server grow from /mnt/gentoo to a high performance server right before your fingertips. It may take all day , but you get to control every step of the install giving you a better feel for how things work - you might even learn a thing or two along the way!.

The DB2 install under Gentoo was painless, all it took was a few USE entries and several emerge statements to get the OS ready to install the tarball.
All I have to do now is find the client tools for OSX….