At work I administer for an iSeries midrange mainframe. Basically I use a 5250 Emulator to interface with the iSeries. IBM has released a version of iSeries Access for Linux, but stay away. For fedora users, you may find it hard to get the dependencies you need to make it work as some of the packages have been removed as of Fedora 4 (I believe). Using it isn’t much better. I found it bulky and cumbersome. But no worries, I did find a great alternative.

TN5250 is an free 5250 emulator, and it is lightweight and easy to use. Better still, you will most likely find it via yum or apt-get.

So skip IBM iSeries Access and go with TN5250. You will be glad you did.