How to install SAP Netweaver 2004 Linux Testdrive on SUSE 9.3 with BW enabled

This tutorial describes how to install the 32 bit Linux Testdrive of SAP Netweaver 2004 on SUSE Linux 9.3 and enable BW functionality. It goes step by step through the distribution installation, environment setup and tasks that need to be done in order to set everything up.

Note:While the SAP documentation recommends Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core 2, SUSE 9.0 and SUSE 9.1 as supported host distributions, I recommend using SUSE 9.3 as it needs the fewest customizations in order to work properly. I also had a series of problems with FC1(incompatibilities with the NetWeaver install script) and FC2(incompatibilities with VmWare and poor performance). I have not tested the install on SUSE 9.0 and 9.1, but I assume it works just as good as it does in SUSE 9.3.

What you will need:

SUSE Linux 9.3 Professional CDs/ISO images

Download the 5 CD images from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.3/iso/
Note: If you follow my instructions exactly, you will only need CD1 and CD5.

1GB RAM and 20GB of hard disk space
Note: I use 30GB and recommend it as a safe value.

SAP Netweaver Linux Testdrive ISO

Download the ISO image parts from the Sap Developer Network Downloads area or straight from ftp://ftp.sap.com/pub/linuxlab/test_drive/NW4/i386/. You will need the files NW4_TestDrive.iso_Part_aa to NW4_TestDrive.iso_Part_ae, that you will merge later into an ISO image. You can either download them after installing SUSE Linux or previously download them and merge them at the moment when you are ready to install Netweaver.

If you follow my instructions exactly, SUSE will be configured as a text mode only server used only for NetWeaver, but if you wish to set it up to have graphical mode too, feel free to add the needed packages. If you wish to use the Java PlatinGUI, installing a graphical manager along with the Java SDK from the packages is a must. For the text moed server SUSE install that I will do, only CD 1 and 5 are needed.

The basic steps of this installation are:

1. Installing the Operating System
2. Preparing the NetWeaver installation
3. Installing Netweaver
4. Enabling BW functionality