I installed this on the Mac. I also have Centos 5.9 on the HP Probook. Here are my notes; it’s much easier these days. This was created in Apr 2010.
Installing in Virtual Box
Remember to use the DVD copy, not Live CD
My first copy on the Mac has Desktop Gnome, Server & Server GUI packages installed. This might not be what I need.
I need to configure the admin user to be a sudoer. See Centos 4.7. In order to remake the kernel, on the Mac, or with 5.3 you need to force the shell interpreter i.e. sh ./VBLinuxAdditions-x86.run.
There is/was a kernel version mismatch; probably caused by the age of my .ISO image. I used the following commands.
# yum install binutils gcc make patch libgomp glibc-headers glibc-devel # yum install kernel-headers kernel-devel # yum install kernel*
The advice was to install the first two lines, but it still didn’t work and so I ran the last line. Not sure what was used and what wasn’t.
I ran the Guest Editions (VB 3.1.6) install script on Centos 5.4 today. I used all the yum commands above and still got a failure to compile the guest additons module. I checked the log which stated it couldn’t find the kernel source, and recommended setting KERN_DIR, so,
export KERN_DIR=/usr/src/kernel/2.6.18-164.15.1.el5-i686/ sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
which works I suggest you use bash’s autocomplete to do this, and I assume your current directory is /media/VBOXADDITIONS_*. This is also documented on the Virtual Box forum thread,Installing Guest Additions into CentOS/RHEL 5.4 27 April 2010
- How to install Guest Additions… at http://forums.virtualbox.org
- Problem Installing GuestAddition for CentOS also at http://forums.virtualbox.org. This contains the advice on the rpms required.
- man yum, which should be useful when installing the other packages I need.
I am having problems with full screen mode. It installs with only 800×600 & 640×480. I have used Adminstration -> Display to change the Display device but at the moment, it’ll only support an 1152×864, despite using system-config-display to define a screen of 1440×900, which I though was the Mac Screen size. Shit! See http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4830. Why is this pile of shit so popular? (I mean Centos not VB, of which I am still a fan.)The keyboard isn’t right either. See also this thread at the VB forums. Lets see if that’s fatal.
Bazaar
I need planet on this distro, so I need Bazaar. Not supported by the standard repositories, so get it from its home page. The repository rpm advised there doesn’t work for me so I used,
This site is advised at rpm.pbone.net’s EPEL release page.
After which
yum install bzr
this works, AFIAK, I have downloaded planet venus using bzr.
Redland RDF
I decided to install Redland RDF first. i.e before testing planet. You would think I have the choice of,
- installing from source
- installing the RPM
- installing a remote REPO based on the librdf.org directory and use yum?
- installing a local REPO and rsync it using the librdf.org directory and use yum.
I decided to try and create a local mirror for the rpms with a local repository. I have written up how to make a local repository on my making a yum repo page. It has some links to pages that helped/inspired me.However I am stuck at the moment and plan to install from the librdf.org source rpms. I will need the following resources,
- http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/RebuildSRPM
- http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/SetupRpmBuildEnvironment
- http://download.librdf.org/source/
In the SetupRpmBuildEnvironment page, above, there are instructions to set up a .rpmmacros file. The required syntax is
%_topdir /home/$user/$dirname
I am pretty clear that the syntax requires the variables to be expanded. The centos page recommends an echo > but I couldn’t get their syntax to work. I was helped by this script from http://www.oldrpm.org I wrote a script that downloaded the sources from librdf.org.
I used rpmbuild –rebuild to create the RPMs then used sudo yum install to discover the missing dependencies and install them, one at a time. This worked fine until I tried to rebuild the bindings. The rebuild fails with the following errors.
Installed (but unpackaged) file(s) found /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/RDF.pyc /usr/lib/python2.4/site-pacages/RDF.pyo
I have found the Koders search for RDF.py, and google points me at the SPEC file in the rpmbuild tree. The %files section on redland-python has lines referenceing RDF.py and Redland.so. locate can’t find these, and its getting a bit beyond me. http://python.org has an SPRM for python-rdflib, but this won’t rebuild because of an error in setup.py.
Oops
Notes as to how I got here follow.
The binary packages are hosted at http://librdf.org/. They have a redhat downloads directory which is based on Fedora Release Versions. Using rpmfind, [rpmfind results html] suggests, Redland 1.0.7 i686 html, with this ftp .rpm download.
I used wget to download the .rpms from http://download.librdf.org/binaries/redhat/fc7/, which may be my mistake. Is fc7 == Centos 5.3? It seems that CENTOS 5.3 is RHEL 5.3 which is based on Fedora Core 6.
So just had another go, Dave Beckett suggests I source the rpms from koji.fedoraproject.org. I am still guessing as to which vesion of the package is required, but I found that the Centos 5.3 distro has rasqal in its repo, so when installing it, from a koji .rpm, it installs from the Centos repo and installs its dependent raptor package. This now leaves just the redland library itself. The versions I have tried all require to modern a version of libdb, libpq and libcurl. I am now trying to get old versions of librdf. Back to librdf.org and ./fc6.
This also works without the repos.d/*.repo file. I used redland-1.0.6. It seems the rpm is in the distro.
Apropos
In order to make apropos work, one must run makewhatis with root privilege.
See also http://superuser.com/questions/346703/linux-apropos-command-always-returns-nothing-appropriate
sudo
Sudo holds its permissions in sudoers file. Centos uses the wheel group to aquire permissions. i.e. the chief user needs to be members of the wheel group.
The export KERN_DIR trick is still required for Centos 6 & Guest Additions 4.2.18