Installing WebSphere MQ 7.5 on Ubuntu 12.04LTS

An item on my mental To Do list for some time has been getting WebSphere MQ installed on Ubuntu. I don’t use it in a production environment, therefore an IBM PartnerWorld Software Access agreement gets me the software for a year, and a virtual machine with Ubuntu circumvents the need to buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
With many things I do that could potentially turn out complicated or non-trivial, I document the entire process. I’m assuming you’re running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu 12.04LTS at this point, and that you’ve also read Quick Beginnings for Linux on IBM’s site.
First, install the ‘rpm’, ‘pax’ and ‘default-jre’ packages. IBM distribute MQ as a set of RPMs, and I decided to install these rather than rebuild them as .deb files.
Next, create /etc/sysctl.d/50-webspheremq.conf with the following:
kernel.msgmni=1024
kernel.shmmni=4096
kernel.shmmax=73834496
kernel.shmall=2097152
kernel.sem=500 256000 250 1024
fs.file-max=32768
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time=500
Make these changes live by running sudo sysctl -p.
Run sudo ./mqlicence.sh, read and agree to the licence.
‘crtmqpmg’ expects to find ‘pax’ in /usr/bin, so create symbolic link to ‘pax’ by running sudo ln -s /bin/pax /usr/bin/pax, then create /usr/lib64 using sudo mkdir /usr/lib64 as the installation process will want to write files in there.
Create a set of MQ packages by running ./crtmqpkg $ID, where $ID is an installation identifier, such as ‘dev’ or ‘prod’. This may take some time. When it’s finished, change to /var/tmp/mq_rpms/$ARCH and install the following RPMs using the command sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps --force-debian:

• MQSeriesRunTime
• MQSeriesServer
• MQSeriesSDK
• MQSeriesClient
• MQSeriesJava
• MQSeriesSamples
• MQSeriesGSKit
• MQSeriesMan

Set this MQ installation as default using sudo /opt/mqm/bin/setmqinst -i -p /opt/mqm, then run dspmqver to verify the installation is correct.
Finally, add your user in to the ‘mqm’ group by running sudo addgroup $USER mqm. Log out and log in for these changes to take effect.