Software Requirements

Eclipse requirements

• Visual COBOL only supports the 32-bit Eclipse IDE and requires a 32-bit Java installation.
• Visual COBOL does not support the 64-bit Eclipse. You can, however, use the 32-bit Eclipse to create both 32-bit and 64-bit applications.
• The setup file installs Visual COBOL and Eclipse 4.4.2. After the installation, you can install the Visual COBOL plug-in into other instances of Eclipse available on the same machine. The supported versions are 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5 for the 32-bit Eclipse only. See Installing Visual COBOL into other instances of Eclipse for instructions.

Other software requirements

Before installing this product, you must have the following software installed on your computer:

• The unzip utility is required by the setup file.

• The pax archiving utility is required by the setup file. Pax is distributed with most UNIX/Linux systems but, if it is missing, you must install it separately. To verify pax is installed, run pax --help or pax --version at the command line.
• Required libraries - the 32-bit libraries listed below are required on both 32-bit and on 64-bit Operating Systems for this product to install and work correctly.

  If installing on a 64-bit OS, the 32-bit libraries are not installed by default and must be installed before you start the installation.

  Library	Platform
  	SUSE 11	SUSE 12	Red Hat 6.x	Red Hat 7
  glibc-locale-32bit	X	X
  gtk2 (libgtk2, gtk2-tools-32-bit)		X
  libXcomposite1-32bit		X
  libgdk_pixbuf-2_0-0-32bit		X
  gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders-32bit		X
  libjasper1-32bit		X
  gtk2-x11 (libgthread-2_0-0-32bit)		X
  libXtst6-32bit		X
  glibc-*.x86_64			X	X
  glibc-*.i686			X	X
  libgcc-*.x86_64			X	X
  libgcc-*.i686			X	X
  libstdc++-*.x86_64			X	X
  libstdc++-*.i686			X	X
  gtk2-*.x86_64			X	X
  gtk2-*.i686			X	X
  gtk2-engines.*.i686			X
  gtk2-engines.*.s390			X
  gtk2-engines.*.x86_64			X	X
  libXtst-*.x86_64			X	X
  libXtst-*.i686			X	X
  libcanberra-gtk2-*.x86_64			X	X
  libcanberra-gtk2-*.i686			X	X
  libgnome.x86_64			X	X
  libgnome.i686			X	X
  PackageKit-gtk-module-*.x86_64			X	X
  PackageKit-gtk-module-*.i686			X
  PackageKit-gtk-module-*.s390			X
  PackageKit-gtk3-module-*.i686				X
  PackageKit-gtk3-module-*.s390				X
  webkitgtk.x86_64			X
  webkitgtk.i686			X
  webkitgtk3.x86_64				X
  webkitgtk3.i686				X
  xterm (any version)			X	X
  gdb*	X	X	X	X

  * Additional libraries required to use the core_on_error runtime variable. The gdb packages (for the GNU Project Debugger) can be installed from the install media for your OS.

  ** Operating system libraries required for PL/I support on both SUSE and Red Hat.

  Visit the Red Hat Web site for more information.

• Xterm, the terminal emulator for the X Window System, is part of your UNIX/Linux distribution but is not installed by default. Use your UNIX/Linux installation media to install it.

• Oracle's Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 7 or Java 8 is required to run the Eclipse IDE, to execute COBOL JVM code and for native COBOL and Java interoperability. The setup file installs Java 8 u51 32-bit. You can download Oracle's Java EE from Oracle's Web site and install it anywhere on your machine.
  Note: On Linux, the 32-bit version of Java is required to install and use Visual COBOL for Eclipse. When you start the installation, if the 64-bit version of Java is already installed on your Linux machine, you might not be able to install Visual COBOL. This is a known issue with the Oracle Java installers for Linux which prevent you from installing both the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of Java on the same machine. To work around this problem:

  • Download the 32-bit Java distribution in a compressed .tar format from the Oracle Web site.
  • Untar the distribution into a location different from the one used for the 64-bit Java version. For example, untar in /usr/local/java32 and not in /usr/local/java.
  • Set JAVA_HOME and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the 32-bit version of Java so that it is used to install and run Visual COBOL.

Before you start the installation, you need to set the environment as follows:

• You need to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable. When installing the product, set this variable to a 32-bit Java installation or the installation terminates. For example, execute the following:

  JAVA_HOME=java_install_dir

  where java_install_dir is the path to the JAVA installation directory such as /usr/java/javan.n

• You need to add $JAVA_HOME/bin to your system PATH variable. To do this, execute:

  export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

• You need to set the LANG environment variable to pick up localized messages. The LANG settings are English and Japanese only.