To put a new application on your system, or remove one you don’t want to keep, select the Install/Remove Software utility from the System Tools menu with Launch → Applications → Systems Tools → Install/Remove Software. You are prompted to enter the root password, which you or your system administrator chose when installing JDS. Next you see a window showing the installed software on your JDS. A screenshot of the window appears in Figure 5-7.
This tool looks similar to the one used in the Java Desktop System Online Update. The selections on the top-left pane allow you to present different views of the system packages, as discussed earlier. The choices include:
Selections
Package Groups
Search
The JDS Software Installation tool opens in the Selections view; however, if you want to see which packages fall under categories such as “Development Tools,” you can choose the Package Groups view, shown in Figure 5-8.
Finally, you can choose Search to search the list of packages and find out whether you have installed specific ones. For example, in Figure 5-9, we did a search on “mc” and found the packages we had installed.
Use Figures Figure 5-7 and Figure 5-8 to acquaint yourself with this important utility. For example, notice the package selections and categories in the left window. As you change from one to another, notice which versions are available and installed in the upper-right window pane. The lower-right pane contains a description of the package you select with additional tabs such as Technical Data and Dependencies.
Tip
Linux programs rely on static and dynamic libraries of software routines, some of which come preinstalled with the base Linux system and others of which have to be installed independently. The term dependencies refers to these requirements that exist between packages. For example, package gaim may require files that are installed by package gtk-2. gtk-2 must be installed, or else gaim will have this unresolved dependency. Normally, the JDS installation manager will disallow the installation of packages with unresolved dependencies.
In Figure 5-7, notice in the left window that four package selections remain unchecked:
Internet Dial-in
Laptop Packages
StarSuite
Development Tools
These selections are useful to specific types of users, and can be left unchecked by others. For example, systems without a dial-up modem don’t need the first unselected package set. Additionally, unless you use a laptop you do not require the Laptop Packages. StarSuite 7 software supports some Asian languages, including Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
The last package, Development Tools, is often important when you do upgrades and add software tools. The Development Tools packages contain software and shared libraries, which allow you to build and modify programs.
Suppose you decide you need one or more of the unchecked packages. Just check the boxes beside the packages in the left window and then push the Accept button in the lower-righthand corner.
The Sun Desktop Configurator tool will scan your package database and then ask you to insert the necessary CD-ROMs from your media kit. Follow the CD-ROM instructions and the requested packages will install.
A time could come when you want a new package that you did not have or need when JDS was installed. In fact, there is a wealth of third-party packages that are not supported by Sun but run very nicely on JDS. In this section, we explain how to find and install new packages.
In Figure 5-10, you can see the view of JDS’s package database, which includes all RPMs installed on your system. In the Package Groups view, Sun shows the database hierarchically. It breaks packages into categories such as Productivity, Libraries, Office, System, etc.
The hierarchical view helps you locate dependencies or applications you may need in order to accomplish tasks that a default installation doesn’t cover. Also, if you install a package from an open source project not included with JDS, you can access it from this view.
In the JDS native state, the JDS Package Groups list in the left pane has a multitude of supported software available from which to choose. You can find other downloadable software at the website http://jdshelp.org.
We will demonstrate how to use the Package Search tool to examine Midnight Commander, an open source file management tool similar to an older program called Norton Commander that used to be extremely popular on Windows systems. (Information about this program is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/mc/.) Figure 5-11 shows the Search view of the Software Installation tool; notice that in the upper-left dialog box we entered “mc,” the abbreviation for Midnight Commander. The right window pane has a check next to “mc,” indicating that it has been installed.
The search mode buttons to the left of the sceen give you choices in how to set up the search. For example, if you can remember only part of the software name, make the appropriate selection.
Though “mc” did not come with the out-of-the-box JDS distribution, the JDS’s RPM system included it in its database and displayed it in this utility after it was installed by the user. Midnight Commander is an example of software you can build to install on JDS. You will see how later in this chapter.
We installed “mc” manually using the text method, but we could uninstall it with the Add/Remove packages utility in the same manner as all other software. To remove “mc,” uncheck the box to the left of the package and press the Accept button. You may remove software in any of the three views of this utility.
You may want to add software that Sun does not support to your distribution of JDS. Advanced users of Linux would have little problem doing this. Novices will need a little background.
JDS began life as a custom build of several components, including the SUSE Linux Professional distribution reengineered by Sun Microsystems. Sun also custom-built the Gnome desktop, added proprietary third party software, and added their own Java Runtime Environment and Java programs. To control the applications they would support, Sun compiled the entire Linux distribution with glibc 2.25, a slightly different version of the Linux core development library, from the version in current use by most distributions.
Different versions of a library usually provide the same functionality, but because of tiny differences in data layout, a program compiled with one version of the library fails to run with an operating system compiled with a different version. For this reason, to run new applications on JDS, you have to build them using the same glibc library, 2.25. This is not hard; we’ll show you how to do that here.
The last time SUSE used version 2.25 of the glibc library to build their Linux distribution was Version 8.1 of the distribution. As of this writing, SUSE’s lastest distribution uses glibc 2.3; it was used in SUSE Versions 8.2, 9.0, and 9.1. So, if you look for SUSE applications on the Internet or from a newer SUSE distribution, they will not install on JDS. On the other hand, if you attempt to use a package from SUSE 8.1, you will be using versions two years old that could contain bugs or be out of date. In this chapter, we present a better solution.
JDS uses the popular RPM system for installation, updates, removal, and maintenace of software. Both the Online Update and Install/Remove utilities described above depend on the text-based RPM system to function. By learning the text-based interface to the RPM management system, you can extend the capabilities of your system by adding software from projects not included in the JDS packages.
Tip
We cover the RPM package management system in Appendix D. You can find further information about this system at http://www.rpm.org/.
RPM originally stood for Red Hat Package Manager, because it was developed by the Linux distributor Red Hat. Now, its maintainers just refer to the system as the RPM Package Manager.
The majority of Linux distributions, as well as a few other operating systems, use the RPM system. It has many features similar to installation programs found on Microsoft Windows. Developers have even ported converted RPM to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.
Let’s look at an example of RPM in use.
To demonstrate use of the RPM system for an installaton on JDS, we chose the application AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). You would start by downloading aim-1.5.286-1.i386.rpm from their web site at http://www.aim.com and carry out the following instructions:
Download AIM onto your system.
Log in as root.
On the command line, type the rpm command as shown in the example:
rpm -i aim-1.5.286-1.i386.rpmin which 1.5.286-1 represents the AIM version and release numbers. On the other hand, if you already have an older version of the package installed and want to install a higher version of AIM, use the rpm upgrade option. For example:
rpm -U aim-1.5.286-1.i386.rpmTo run AIM, open a terminal and type:
/usr/bin/aimon the command line.
In the next section, we’ll explain the process step by step.
The central task in installing unsupported software on JDS is to use source RPMs. Other RPMs will not install; attempts to do so will give you error messages saying that you are trying to use the wrong version of glibc. After reading the previous section, you understand why. Source RPMs take more effort but should install successfully.
The typical sequence in adding software not included with JDS is:
Locate the web site of the desired software package.
Read the documentation about the software package—i.e. dependencies, version number, other required software.
Query the RPM database on your JDS to find out if the packages already exist and in what version. They may need to be updated.
Choose the RPMs to download from the web site. The RPMs have to be compatible or written for JDS.
Build the source RPMs, which yield binary RPMs (those ready to install, as demonstrated below).
Upgrade the packages on your JDS from the binary RPMs built from the source files.
Install the binary RPMs you downloaded.
Here is another example, in greater detail, of adding software to JDS. We’ll use XCDROAST, CD burning software, in this demonstration. XCDROAST performs many functions not found in the Nautilus Browser’s CD-Burn that is included with JDS. The most important of those involves creating bootable CD-ROM disks, which you may need to upgrade JDS.
To add XCDROAST we had to upgrade the underlying software called cdrtools. We learned this from the requirements specified by the web page.
We found the source RPMs for cdrtools at the download site for the project: http://xcdroast.sourceforge.net/RPMS/a15/src.rpm/. We also noticed that a current version of the program existed at http://xcdroast.sourceforge.net/RPMS/a15/suse-8.1/. We decided to use the version for SUSE 8.1 because, as discussed, the project team built it for glibc 2.25.
Tip
The XCDROAST Project currently provides binary RPMs for JDS at the following URL:
http://xcdroast.sourceforge.net/RPMS/a15/sun_jds/
As this shows, the instructions in this section may become increasingly unncessary as JDS becomes more popular and software developers create packages for it.
We had to compile the source RPMs (rpm —rebuild filename.src.rpm) and add the packages from Development Tools, using the Install/Remove Software tool mentioned earlier in this chapter. We then built the cdrtools with the command:
suPassword:(fill in your password)rpm --rebuild cdrtools-2.00.3-1.src.rpm.
Once the build process completed, we found our new RPMs in the directory usr/src/packages/RPMS/i386. We installed the cdrtools with the command:
rpm -U cdrtools*.rpm Then we downloaded and installed the binary RPMs for XCDROAST:
rpm -i xcdroast*.rpm In Figure 5-12, you can see that after installation, the JDS menu system found XCDROAST in the local RPM database and added an icon to launch the program under Launch → Applications → Other.
