NyQuest Consulting, LLC

1. What Distribution of Linux is officially supported?
Officially, Banner® is only supported on a Redhat AS Environment. However, many clients have had good success using CentOS Linux as a free replacement. Currently versions 5 and 6 under support. CentOS 7 also seems to work.

2. Should I use 64 Bit or 32 Bit Versions of Linux?
In the past, Banner® was supported under both 32 and 64 bit linux. With the introduction of Banner® XE, only 64 bit versions are now supported.

3. What type of hardware should I use?
For test systems you can pretty much use whatever you want, after all, it's test. For production systems, we recommend that you use at least an Intel quad-core system 2GHz system, with 8 GB RAM, and dual gigabit NICs. You may need a larger system than this if you have larger numbers of users, but this is sort of minimum setup. Be sure the disk has some sort of redundancy built in (remember also to MIRROR and NOT stripe the boot volume). You can run the Application Server on VM, but you should run the Database on a real system.

4. What version of C Compiler do I need?
For the C compiler, you will need to use gcc-3.2.2 or gcc-3.2.3. There are other versions which will compile, but these seem the most stable. As gcc is GNU software, you can get this for free.

5. What version of Cobol Compiler do I need?
This is the messy step. You will need to get Netcobol for Linux Version or Microfocus Cobol for Linux.

6. ICU Requirement

The server that will function as the Job Submission server will also need to have International Components for Unicode install.
For more information about running Banner® on Linux, contact Nyquest Consulting!