2.3 Installing Binaries on Linux

Installing binaries on Linux systems is an easy task. Two major packet-managing tools are available for Linux. In this section you will have a brief look at both systems.

2.3.1 RPM Packages

The RPM system was originally developed by Red Hat and is the most widespread management tool for binary as well as source packages.

To find out if PostgreSQL is already installed on your system, you can use rpm -qva to display a list of all packages installed on the system. To extract all core packages of PostgreSQL, grep can be used. The result might look like the one shown in the next listing:

 [root@duron root]# rpm -qva | grep postgr postgresql-libs-7.2.0 postgresql-python-7.2.0 postgresql-jdbc-7.2.0 postgresql-7.2.0 postgresql-odbc-7.2.0 postgresql-tk-7.2.0 postgresql-devel-7.2.0 postgresql-contrib-7.2.0 postgresql-perl-7.2.0 postgresql-server-7.2.0 postgresql-docs-7.2.0 postgresql-tcl-7.2.0 

In this case many PostgreSQL 7.2 packages are installed on the system.

To install additional packages, you can use the following command:

 rpm -Uvh names_of_packages 

U tells RPM to update all existing packages. v stands for verbose, and h tells PHP to display 50 hash marks as the package archive is unpacked.

2.3.2 Debian Packages

Installing Debian packages is as simple as installing RPM packages. Simply use dselect to add or remove packages from the system. Using the package manager guarantees that all software packages PostgreSQL depends on are installed on the system.