Need lots of help to setup custom Linux Installation
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Need lots of help to setup custom Linux Installation
Hello all,
Although I consider myself somewhat computer literate, Linux still seems to make me feel stupid. I hope any of you can help me with my problems.
1. I need to know of a way to add a RPM to a linux installation distro (and which distro to use...)
The software, iSeries access for Linux, has certain requirements:
* GLibc 2.2
* RPM 3.0
* OpenMotif 2.0 or later for the 5250 emulator
* unixODBC driver manager version 2.0.11 or later must be installed on the client.
(I think I also need X as well, I prefer GNOME)
2. I need to have this distro on a USB drive to install it to other PC HDDs. (create an .iso?)
3. I would like to have the initial install program to prompt you for specific installations:
* iSeries access client only
* iSeries access client, and firefox web browser
* iSeries access client, firefox, and openoffice suite
* also, configure tcp/ip, mouse, all other hardware options.
4. After the installation, have the linux distro autologin, and start the iseries client automatically.
Wow, that's a lot of questions in one post! You might want to break this up into bite-sized chunks, but I'll take a stab at the first question.
1. There are lots of ways to add RPMs to an installed Linux distro--that's easy. (I'm not too sure about adding an RPM to the distro before the distro is installed, if that's what you're asking.)
Simply download the RPM you need to the /home/user_x directory. (Substitute your user name for "user_x".)
a) You could open a terminal session (this is similar to opening a MS-DOS session under Windows). Unless you are the root user, you need to 'su' and enter the root user password. Then you can run the rpm program. For example,
rpm -Uhv /home/user_x/*.rpm
will install every RPM in the /home/user_x directory.
--OR--
b) You could start the file browser, nautilus. If it doesn't open your /home/user_x directory immediately, navigate your way there. You can simply double-click the RPMs you want to install. (At some point, you still need to enter the root password.)
--OR--
c) You could click on the Red Hat Network Alert Notification Tool to download and install any updated versions of software you are already using. (The root user password is still required.) This only updates to versions that have been officially approved for your distro, not to the absolute bleeding edge of development. If you need a later version of that program, you will have to download and install it separately.
There are other methods. The bad news is a particular RPM will not install if you have not installed the RPMs it depends on. The good news is if it fails a dependency, it will tell you what is missing. You can Google whatever is missing and download it. Sometimes the only way to get a specific RPM to install is to install all of the RPMs it depends on at the same time.
1A. Which distro to use? Search this forum. There are hundreds of threads on just this topic. Try clicking on "Distro Reviews" in the upper left corner of this web page. You get to do your own homework, here.
2. Hmmmm, distro on a thumb drive.... Well, a friend of mine once said, "There ain't no can'ts if you've got a big enough hammer." In other words, anything's possible. On the other hand, most computers without an operating system installed resemble boat anchors in many respects. Very, very dumb. If you've got a motherboard BIOS that can boot from USB, great! Otherwise, you're going to have to put a USB device driver on something that is bootable (such as floppy, CDROM, Network interface card, hard drive). Once you've booted, you can insert the thumb drive and install. Not trivial.
3. If you want a custom install program that installs custom software, I'd say it's time to dust off the old C/C++ programming manual. It would be much easier to install a vanilla version of Linux, then follow that with one of three CDROMs with whatever flavor of programs (RPMs) you want to install on that machine.
4. Yes, this is possible, but autologins defeat the built-in security of Linux. If your program were set up as a service, it would run in the background and you wouldn't have to log on. For example, Samba is a service, and you don't have to log on to the machine for it to serve files.
Based on what you are wanting I think Ubuntu will help you out a lot. They also have a tool that can install rpm's even though it is not an rpm based distro.
Damn Small Linux has a distro configuration thing that lets you customize the installation files. It also runs from a thumb drive (if the computer will boot from a USB drive). The rest you might have to reduce to simpler questions.
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