Installing Dante on Different Distributions

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The following sections describe techniques and tasks for installing Dante on the three sample distributions. The previous material is generic; it is applicable to any distribution. The sections that follow tailor the general information and demonstrate real installations on real distributions.

Installing Dante on Red Hat Linux

Recall that Dante is a textbook example of an installation. However, the example installation from this chapter installs the software into /usr/local, and it is not known to the package manager, RPM. Consequently, RPM can't manage or protect the installed files. As always, it would be convenient to have an actual RPM package to install, rather than having to build one manually. Therefore, if you can find a prebuilt RPM package for Red Hat Linux, you may wish to use it. (A good source to check for such packages is rpmfind.net.) Otherwise, you can build Dante from source code and configure it as described in this chapter if you don't have a prebuilt binary RPM. Alternatively, you could create your own RPM package of Dante by creating an RPM specification (.spec) file for it. You should see the "Packaging Format" section of Chapter 4 for more information.

Installing Dante on Slackware Linux

Slackware's philosophy is to keep the system as simple as possible, and cases like this are where that philosophy really pays off. Installing Dante on a Slackware system is about as straightforward a task as you could hope for. The details in this chapter should be plainly applicable to a Slackware system.

The only potential exception is if you wish to install Dante such that it can be managed by Slackware's packaging tools, as discussed in Chapter 5. Fortunately, this is as simple as installing Dante to a different directory (via the –prefix argument to the ./configure script), and then using Slackware's tools for creating and installing packages. See the "Packaging Format" section of Chapter 5 for full details.

Installing Dante on Debian GNU/Linux

As with Red Hat Linux and Slackware Linux, installing Dante on Debian GNU/Linux is extremely easy. However, Debian actually includes a prebuilt binary installation of Dante that you can use, saving you the effort of building and installing Dante yourself. The package name is dante-client, and you can obtain it through the apt-get program in the usual way (as discussed in Chapter 6 in the section on "Using the apt-get Program"). If you also need the Dante SOCKS server (which isn't discussed in this book), you can likewise obtain in via apt-get by installing the dante-server package.

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