2.2. Installing the RPM Package

In the top-right corner of every Webmin website page is a link for the RPM package. A link can also be found on the page www.webmin.com/download.html. Once you have downloaded it, you should have a file on your Linux system named something like webmin-1.1.100-1.noarch.rpm. To install, run the following command as root:

rpm –U webmin-1.1.100-1.noarch.rpm

The RPM install can only fail if you do not have Perl installed, or if Webmin cannot identify your operating system. If that occurs and your Linux distribution is on the list of supported operating systems, you should install the tar.gz version instead. Because all Linux distributions are slightly different, the Webmin install process has to positively identify the exact distribution and version that you are running, such as Red Hat 7.3. This can fail if one of the files that contain the distribution name (such as /etc/issue) has been modified.

Assuming the RPM install successfully completes, you will be able to login to Webmin immediately. Open a web browser, and go to the URL http://localhost:10000/ if you are running the browser on the same Linux system on which Webmin was installed, or http://your-systems-hostname:10000/ if the browser is being run on another PC. Either way, a web form will appear prompting for a username and password, as shown in Figure 2.1.

You should be able to login as root, using the same password as the root UNIX user on your Linux system. If the password is changed using the command-line passwd command or the Users and Groups module, your Webmin password will change too.

If the OpenSSL library and the Net::SSLeay Perl module have already been installed on your system, Webmin will automatically start in SSL mode. This means that you should use a URL starting with https:// instead of http:// to connect to it. Attempting to connect with the non-SSL URL will only bring up a page with a link to the https:// URL on it, which you should follow to log in.