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Installation variances

Once you’ve extracted Install from your tape, you can tell Install what software to install, what form of the programs you need, and what installation steps to do. In the following documentation are some examples covering common situations. For a full explanation of each possible Install argument, see Running the Install script.

Install’s default tape drive is the non-rewinding tape drive for your system (see Device names), appropriate for the most common cases. If your tape drive is different, you need to use the ‘--tape=/dev/tape’ option; the examples that follow show this option for completeness. Remember to specify a non-rewinding tape device.

Installing only binaries or source from tape

If you don’t want the source—for instance, to save space—you can use the argument, bin.

# tar xvf device
Install
# ./Install --tape=device bin ...

By the same token, if you don’t wish to install the binaries—for instance, if you plan to rebuild them from source anyway—you can use the argument, source.

# tar xvf device
Install
# ./Install --tape=device source ...

Installing in a nonstandard location

If you wish to install this GNUPro Toolkit distribution in a directory other than the default, ‘/usr/cygnus’, use the ‘-installdir’ option to Install. Remember, though, you must set some environment variables in order for the tools to function at all. See Running the programs.

# cd /tmp
# tar xvf device
# Install
# ./Install --tape=device --installdir=device location bin...

Installing with a remote tape drive

If your host doesn’t have an appropriate tape drive, you may still be able to install your software. Check with your system administrator to see if another machine at your site has a tape drive you can use.

- If a shared file system is available between the two machines, and it has enough space, use the following process.

Create ‘/usr/cygnus’ on your host (the one where you want to install this Progressive Release) as a symbolic link to a directory where the other machine (the one with a tape drive) can write.

ln -s shared /usr/cygnus

Run Install from the machine with a tape drive, using the ‘extract’ argument and the ‘--installdir’ option:

Install extract --installdir=shared

You still have to finish the installation; however, the last two steps (fixincludes and test) must be run on your host. (If you forget, there’s no great harm done. Install notices that it can’t carry out a full installation on the wrong machine, and stops with an error message—then you can go back and try again. When Install notices a problem, it doesn’t carry out any action other than giving a helpful error message).

Unless you are installing a cross-development tape (the tape label says ‘target = <target>’ where <target> corresponds to the system that you target for cross configurations), the ‘fixincludes’ part of the installation is essential. For a more complete explanation, see Why convert system header files?, if you’re curious.

On a machine on your network with a tape drive:

./Install extract binary --installdir=shared/cygnus ...
./Install extract source --installdir=shared/cygnus ...

On your host:

ln -s shared/cygnus /usr/cygnus
cd /usr/cygnus/progressive-97r1a

If your copy of the GNUPro Toolkit is configured native (to develop software for the same type of machine where GNUPro Toolkit runs), you’ll have to run ‘Install fixincludes’ and ‘Install test’ from your host afterwards.

Native configurations only:

./Install fixincludes test

- If some form of file transfer (such as uucp) is available, use the following process.

Read the second file on the tape using a system utility (for instance, dd on UNIX systems; see the system documentation for the machine with the disk drive). There are two files on the distribution tape; the first contains just the Install script in uncompressed tar format, and the second is a compressed tar format file containing the rest of the release. Read both of these files separately, using something like the input in the following example.

# tar xvf non-rewinding-tape-device
# Install
# dd if=non-rewinding-tape-device of=tarfile1 bs=62k

Messages from dd:

# ls
# Install
# tarfile1

Then transfer them to your own machine using uucp, ftp, or another file transfer tool. (The blocksize is set to 62k in this example simply to speed up the process; the tape is written with a blocksize of 62k, but dd should be able to cope with the task using its default blocksize.)

Then run Install, but use ‘-tape=tarfile’ to specify the name of the installation file, instead of ‘-tape=device’ as in the previous examples. In the simplest case, for instance (starting after you’ve transferred Install and the tar file to your system), use something like the input in the following example.

# ./Install -tape=tarfile1