2.2 Downloading the Samba Distribution

If you would like to download the latest version of the Samba software, the primary web site is http://www.samba.org. Once connected to this page, you'll see links to several Samba mirror sites across the world, both for the standard Samba web pages and for sites devoted exclusively to downloading Samba. For the best performance, choose a site that is closest to your own geographic location.

The standard Samba web sites have Samba documentation and tutorials, mailing-list archives, and the latest Samba news, as well as source and binary distributions of Samba. The download sites (sometimes called F T P sites ) have only the source and binary distributions. Unless you specifically want an older version of the Samba server or are going to install a binary distribution, download the latest source distribution from the closest mirror site. This distribution is always named:

 samba-latest.tar.gz 

which for the 2.2.6 release is an approximately 5MB file.

The source distribution has been archived with tar and then compressed with the GNU gzip program. To unpack it, move the file to the directory in which you want the Samba source directory to be located, then cd to that directory and run the command:

 $  tar xvfz samba-latest.tar.gz  

Or, if you do not have the GNU tar program (which also handles the unzipping):

 $  gunzip samba-latest.tar.gz  $  tar xvf samba-latest.tar  

In that latter case, you might need to install the GNU gunzip program first. While the tar command runs, it will print out a list of the files it installs .

2.2.1 Read the Documentation

This part might seem obvious, but at one time or other you probably uncompressed a package, blindly typed:

 $  configure; make; make install  

and walked away to get another cup of coffee. Do yourself a favor and be a little more careful this time.

In the top-level directory that you just installed, there is a file named WHATSNEW.txt , which contains the latest news about the release. If you are upgrading, you can find important information about bug fixes or configuration parameters that have been added or are no longer supported.

With both source and binary packages you'll find a large number of documents in the docs directory, in a variety of formats. One file is especially important:

 docs/htmldocs/UNIX_INSTALL.html 

This is the Samba Team's official instructions on installing Samba on a Unix system, which you might like to use as another perspective besides what we are telling you here.

In general, we expect you'll find to be most useful the files in the following directories:

docs/faq

This is the Samba Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) files.

docs/htmldocs

This is the miscellaneous documentation in HTML format.

docs/textdocs

Here is more documentation, in simple text format.

docs/manpages

You don't need to worry about these yet; during the installation, the files will be installed so that you can use the man command to read them. But you can take a look in the directory to see which manpages are available.