Q. Why does the condemned man get a last cigarette, instead of one of those through-the-skin stick-on nicotine thingies?

A. Don’t patch the executable.

– rec.humor.funny

Bad Abaqus! Or more properly, bad ZeroG InstallAnywhere! This post indicates that AMD64 Java doesn’t have NPTL problems you keep checking for. And then, when I comment out the parts of the installer script that check for that, it ends up shifting the position of this godawful binary you put at the end of what was otherwise a shell script (or two), and then it won’t extract properly, and I end up searching half the day trying to figure out why I keep getting

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/zerog/lax/LAX

errors every time I run the installer. So note to anyone else installing Abaqus on amd64 Debian (i386 works fine if you use the -nosystemchecks flag): make sure any line you put a comment on, you either edit in overwrite mode, or you make sure you delete a character for every # sign you add. Example patch section:

--- /cdrom/lnx86_64/product/UNIX/Disk1/InstData/NoVM/install.bin
+++ /tmp/aba/lnx86_64/product/UNIX/Disk1/InstData/NoVM/install.bin
@@ -2086,49 +2086,49 @@
if [ `uname` = "Linux" ]; then
debugOut "checking for NPTL + JVM vulernability..."
#check libc to see if it was compiled with NPTL
-       nptl="`strings /lib/libc.so.6 | grep -i nptl`"
-       if [ "$nptl" ]; then
-               debugOut "NPTL detected! checking for vulnerable JVM....";
+#nptl="`strings /lib/libc.so.6 | grep -i nptl`"
+#if [ "$nptl" ]; then
+#      debugOut "NPTL detected! checking for vulnerable JVM....";

note how each # sign has replaced one tab or other whitespace character. Your ultimate goal here is to convince the installer that you do not, in fact, need any LD_ASSUME_KERNEL hackery here. If you let Abaqus continue with its out-of-the-box amd64 install, all kinds of stuff like ls, nawk, etc. will complain with problems loading shared libraries.

So copy the installation CD to the hard drive, edit install.bin along the lines of what’s shown above, and run the main setup script with the -nosystemchecks flag. You might also want to use -jre system flag as well if you have Sun Java installed.

And on a much less aggravating note, to paraphrase from The Princess Bride: this flag -console, I do not think it means what you think it means: