Spent about an hour or so in total this evening installing WebSphere Community Edition on my own laptop where I run Ubuntu 9.10. Needed an application server to deploy the web applications I create when trying to teach myself how to do Java development. The first try was to install Tomcat 6, which was quite easy using the package manager. But after I had done some thinking I turned to WAS CE instead, why not, since WebSphere is the product I know best (beeing well aware of the fact that under the hood in WAS CE, you will, among various open source projects, find Tomcat as well).
The installation was quite easy, just followed the Quick Start-guide combined with the Setup Troubleshooting (Prerequisites for Ubuntu, read this one first!!). After that I just had some issues with getting WAS CE to understand where to find the correct Java installation, but this guide saved me combined with me just realizing that I have to run it as root. Guess I could avoid that, but who cares, it is my own laptop.
Anyhow, this is the admin console, so the next step will be to deploy applications from Eclipse, but that will be another day…
@Update: Not a problem at all to get rid of the root:root
> su
> cd /opt
> chown -R myuser:mygroup IBM/
> exit
> cd IBM/WebSphere/CeAppServer/bin
> ./start-server.sh
…server started…