> we are planning to upgrade our old TSM 4.2 server (43p, 133Mhz, AIX 4.3)
>  with a Qualstar 46120 AIT2 tape library to a new server, os and TSM
> version. Since we are using Debian Linux on a lot of servers, we would
> like to also run TSM 5.x with Debian Linux. I know from out old AIX box,
> that for the tape library we need special ADSM Drivers for the tapes and
> for the picker.
>
> No I would like to know, if anybody has experiences with TSM on a Debian
> server, how kernel dependend this is, if we need special drivers for the
>  tape library, etc. I know, that TSM is not officially supported on
> Debian Linux yet.

I've been running TSM on Debian at home (with no libraries or drives) for
a while already. I also did a test of TSM 5.3 on a Debian PC with a Spectra
2K library and 2 AIT drives. It worked very well, the only problem I had
was with the library that couldn't dismount tapes properly. In my opinion
the problem was with the library and not TSM/Debian (I posted a message on
the list in January about this, if you're interested).

I suggest you install TSM 5.3 which uses the Linux "sg" driver to access
non-IBM devices, which is your case (prior to 5.3 TSM provided its own
"tsmscsi" driver which was kernel-dependent).

You can convert the RPMs to Debian format with "alien -kv <file>.rpm" and
then install them with "dpkg -i ...".

Dmitri