ICT 213 Multi-user Operating Systems

Installing Software

Software can come from several sources

• Source code that needs to be compiled and installed

• Binary executables

• RPM packages

• Debian packages

Tar files

• Most software packages require a large number of files: source code, image files, configuration files, etc

• Windows will package these as zip files; Unix packages them as tar files

• To create a tar file in a directory

  tar -cf file.tar files...
  	    

  will recursively collect all the files

• To list a tar file contents

  tar -lf file.tar
  	    

• To unpack a tar file

  tar -xf file.tar
  	    

• There are many compression algorithms and tar can handle many of them

  • If it is compressed with compress by convention it ends in .tar.Z Unpack by

    zcat file.tar.Z | tar -xf -
    	    

  • If it is compressed with gzip by convention it ends in .tgz Unpack by

    tar -zxf file.tgz
    	    

  • If it is compressed with bzip2 by convention it ends in .bz2 Unpack by

    tar -jxf file.bz2
    	    

Autoconf

• There are many varieties of Unix: Linux, BSD, Solaris, ...

• There are several architectures: 64-bit RISC, 686, 586, ...

• Some programs need to be configured differently for the possible variations

• Autoconf is used to set up software for automatic configuration. It is tricky, but not your concern here

• If there is a file configure in the top-level directory of your package, then you need to run it to setup the build environment

  ./configure
  	    

• See for example, djmount-0.71.tar.gz (you may need to install the fuse-dev package first)

Make

• If the top level directory contains a Makefile then make is used to build the system

  make
  	    

• it is also used to install the system

  make install
  	    

• And to clean up afterwards

  make clean
  	    

• A simple Makefile is

  file : file1.o file2.o
      cc -o file file1.o file2.o
      # note the line above starts with tab
  
  file1.o : file1.c mytypes.h
      cc -c file1.c
  
  file2.o : file2.c mytypes.h
      cc -c file2.c
  	    

RPM packages

• Redhat-based systems use the rpm package manager to build and install systems

• To install a new package

  rpm -i file.rpm
  	    

• To update an existing package

  rpm -u file.rpm
  	    

• To remove an existing package

  rpm -e package
  	    

• To list the files in a package

  rpm -q -l -p file.rpm
  	    

Yum

• rpm will fail if other packages are required and they are not installed

• Yum will try to install all necessary packages

  yum -i file.rpm
  	    

Debian packages

• Debian-based systems use their own package management, with .deb files

• The command to install a package and its dependencies is

  apt-get install package-name
  	    

• The current package information is brought up to date by

  apt-get update
  	    

• To bring all your installed packages up to date,

  apt-get upgrade
  	    

• The tool dpkg can be used to manipulate packages, like rpm

Debian package info

• aptitude search ~i |less
  	    

• dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Package}\n'|less
  	    

GUI tools

• Ubuntu:/Gnome "Ubuntu software centre"

• Redhat/Gnome: "Applications -> System tools -> Add/remove software"

Summary

There are several different ways of installing software

• Build from source

• Run install scripts

• Install or update RPM or DEB packages

Proxies

• For Yum, edit /etc/yum/yum.conf to contain

  	    
  proxy=http://mycache.mydomain.com:3128
  # The account details for yum connections
  proxy_username=yum-user
  proxy_password=qwerty
  	    
  	  

  See Managing software with yum
• Ubuntu 11.10: I did have success by setting Acquire::http::proxy in /etc/apt/apt.conf in the format

  	    
  Acquire::http::proxy "http://user:pass@host:port/";
  	    
  	  

  I use the Software Centre to install Synaptic and from then on use Synaptic. It has a configuration menu