Section 20.8. Installing Geronimo

20.8. Installing Geronimo

Using a platform-neutral system like Java has both advantages and disadvantages. A disadvantage is that, generally, Java products don't use the traditional installation mechanisms of your native platform. For Linux users that means that with Java you don't install using an RPM or a DEB. But this is somewhat offset by the fact that all a Java application needs is for its classes (in JARs) to be arranged in a particular pattern on the filesystem. In other words, all you need to do to install Geronimo is to unpack the tarball.

You did the hard part already. Since you have created the group and made yourself a member of that group (see Section 20.3), any member of the group can install the product:

 $ cd /usr/local $ tar xzvf geronimo.tar.gz ... $ 

Tip

At this point we suggest using one more Linux filesystem trick. The tarball unpacks into a directory whose name includes the product versionin this case, geronimo-1.0-M1. In many cases, you will want to be able to have more than one version of Geronimo installed on a box simultaneously, either because you need to port projects from one version to another, or perhaps because you need to develop applications that will run on different versions on different target servers. To make your life easier, create a symbolic link to a generically named directory, such as geronimo and have that symlink point to geronimo-1.0-M1. Then you can write your startup and shutdown scripts to use the geronimo pathname. You can then switch to another version by changing where the symlink points:

 $ cd /usr/local $ ln -s geronimo-1.0-M1/ geronimo 

This process is discussed in detail in Section 6.2 in the context of switching between Java SDK versions.