RPM installation instructions

1. Download one of the following packages (see main page for more details on the differences between these two):

​http://rpm.netlabs.org/bootstrap/rpm-yum-bootstrap-1_5-p4.wpi (newer systems)
​http://rpm.netlabs.org/bootstrap/rpm-yum-bootstrap-1_5-i386.wpi (older systems)

2. Select a target drive for installation. Consider the following:
   
   
   • The target drive should be big enough to install all software you need from RPM repositories. A good estimate is 5G of free space (this counts future RPM releases of big applications like Java, OpenOffice and so on). If you are a developer, you should double this reserve (so that it can fit the compiler and various frameworks).
   • The installer will create a simplified Unix tree on the target drive. This single tree will be used by all software ported from !Unix/!Linux and distributed with RPM.
   • It is a good idea to select the boot volume as a target drive for the RPM installation (provided that it is big enough). This way, all system components, including those installed from RPM repositories, will live on a single drive and not interfere with your personal data (or with your custom installations of applications from ZIP archives) which we recommend to store on a separate partition.
   • Installing the RPM and Unix tree to a sub-folder is not well tested and therefore not yet possible.
     
     
3. Start the WPI installer and carefully follow the on-screen instructions.
   
   

The RPM installation installs some new and some changed dlls in your %unixroot%\usr\lib directory. This means also you will have some duplicates on your harddrive now. With this ​Utility you can find them and eliminate.

Please keep in mind that while it is possible in principle to move the Unix tree together with all software installed from RPM to a different drive later, this operation requires special knowledge. Therefore, it is recommended to plan the hard disk space usage before installing RPM, as described above.

After installation, please read the ​RPM How-To for End Users that describes the basics of YUM and RPM which you need to know in order to install and remove software distributed as RPM packages.

Conflicting OS/2-Unix tools

A set of unix tools coming from findutils and coreutils packages are conflicting with native OS/2 tools. The conflicting binaries are the following ones

• date, dir, find, hostid, sort

By default, these binaries are now installed into /@unixroot/usr/libexec/bin directory to avoid conflicts with OS/2 native tools. If you want to use the unix tools as default tools, just install the os2-base-unixtools-path rpm package with:

yum install os2-base-unixtools-path

and reboot. This will add %UNIXROOT%\usr\libexec\bin directory in front of your PATH setting in CONFIG.SYS.