Comments on: Using sigtool in Linux

By: octo

octo — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:53:36 +0000

For many older JDE tool versions, you also need to modify rapc.jar in a similar way. The offending backslashes are in the code that processes internationalization resource files, so you might not have noticed if you haven’t tried using those.

As of the gold version of the JDE 4.7 tools, I have some interesting observations to report:

First, you no longer need to modify rapc.jar

Second, you still need to modify a backslash in SignatureTool.jar, in the q.class file.

For normal operations, you may never notice this. I certainly didn’t. It never causes a problem most of the time. But in a weird situation that only happened on my build server, and only with multi-targetted builds, it lead to a temporary directory getting created in a way that confused the crap out of my build process. It took a lot of invasive debugging to figure this out.

By: Travis

Travis — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:01:53 +0000

I can confirm that you no longer need to modify JavaLoader.jar. It appears that the version RIM distributes is now portable across platforms.

By: Somebody

Somebody — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:17:49 +0000

I don’t know if something has changed in more recent versions, but it does NOT appear to be necessary to make any modifications to the SignatureTool.jar file for it to work in Linux. Just run “java -jar SignatureTool.jar” and it works exactly the same as it does in windoze. Same with rapc.jar.

By: Mark Kopec

Mark Kopec — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:33:53 +0000

Wow, great post!

I’ve had to get my team to use VMware on top of Linux just to have a stable Windows environment to constantly sign and build each properly without the headache of doing fancy things like this with the sigtool and the rapc compiler.

Now however, to integrate and build this continuously with the rest of our server-side code these suggestions sound like a nice option!

Thanks JiGGak, how did you learn to dive into the HEX of the sigtool to make these changes!?! that’s great stuff!

By: jiGGaK

jiGGaK — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:13:30 +0000

Nice one Kevin!

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:59:38 +0000

I tried the xvfb suggestion and it worked:

sudo apt-get install xvfb

xvfb-run java -jar SignatureTool.jar -a -C -p xxx xxx.cod

Thanks!

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 22:54:12 +0000

I’m having the same problem as tvb: java.awt.HeadlessException

Did you, or anyone, come up with a solution or workaround? We don’t have time built into our project for me to reverse engineer the signing app, unfortunately.

Thanks.

By: tvb

tvb — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:32:57 +0000

Drag indeed! I looked at the method signatures of the tool hoping to find some public “sign” method that I could invoke through a custom wrapper class, but no such luck. RIMM isn’t all that great with documentation either, so it’s going to be tough to write a signature tool. I guess Xvfb is the best approach. Thanks for your help.

By: jiGGaK

jiGGaK — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:45:15 +0000

Drag…

Well there is always the X windows virtual frame buffer. This enables X to run without any physical display hardware. I don’t have any experience with this though.

And if you are REALLY committed to this, you could attempt to reverse engineer the signing process in order to write your own signature tool sans-gui.

By: tvb

tvb — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:08:06 +0000

jiGGaK – thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, it looks like the tool is trying to bring up the GUI when it’s applying the siganture, so it still fails, even though I set the headless property to true:

Exception in thread “main” java.awt.HeadlessException
at java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.checkHeadless(GraphicsEnvironment.java:159)
at java.awt.Window.(Window.java:317)
at java.awt.Frame.(Frame.java:419)
at javax.swing.JFrame.(JFrame.java:194)
at net.rim.device.codesigning.signaturetool.v.a(Unknown Source)
at net.rim.device.codesigning.signaturetool.v.(Unknown Source)
at net.rim.device.codesigning.signaturetool.SignatureTool.(Unknown Source)
at net.rim.device.codesigning.signaturetool.SignatureTool.main(Unknown Source)