EasyInstall should be just that, but probably won't be. An installer is a complex thing and depends heavily on the environment around it. If you're running Fedora Core 6, Fedora 7, Fedora 8, Fedora 9 or Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) or 8.04 LTS and accept all the defaults, there is a reasonable chance it'll work. If you're running an older release with either MySQL < 5.0 or Apache < 2.2, you may well have problems... On other RPM-based distributions with the yum updater (SuSE, CENTOS, RHEL) you're in with a chance of it working, or at the very least installing most of the necessary infrastructure for you. Other non-RPM based distributions will almost certainly fail (apart from Ubuntu which should work), but if you feed back the error messages, we'll have a go at fixing it. If using an apt-get based distribution, modifying the places where it checks for "Ubuntu" to whatever your distribution returns when you do an lsb_release -sir may well help.

To run easyinstall, become the super user (root) and issue the following commands:

# cd unpack_location/install
# ./easyinstall

and follow the onscreen prompts. Packages invoked by this script will include your package manager (yum, apt-get, etc) and the perl CPAN installer. At the end of the package configuration questions, you will be shown your answers and asked for comfirmation; if you answer n for no, you'll be asked the questions again. After that, once the installation phase starts, if you make a mistake in answering a question press <CTRL>-C to abort and start again. Between all the package managers and installers, you may well have to answer a couple of dozen questions in all.

The final system configuration step before starting using WACS is only applicable if you're using a version of Linux which includes the security hardening extension, SELinux. This currently is limited to the Red Hat based distributions like Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CENTos. Rumour has it OpenSuSE will shortly be including SELinux as an option. Unfortunately this release of WACS is not compatible with SELinux and so it'll have to be configured so as to ensure that SELinux is running in a reduced mode that will not block the WACS components from working. We hope to have this resolved by the next release of WACS. You can determine the current mode of SELinux using the sestatus command:

% /usr/sbin/sestatus
SELinux status:                 disabled
% 

To change the normal operational mode, you need to edit the file called /etc/sysconfig/selinux and change the line which reads SELINUX=enabled to either SELINUX=permissive (generates big log files and slows machine but allows for SELinux to be turned back on later more easily) or SELINUX=disabled (which disables it completely but can cause problems in the future if you want to switch it back on). You will also probably want to disable it immediately rather than doing a reboot before you can continue working on WACS - to do this, become root and run the following:

# /usr/sbin/setenforce 0
setenforce: SELinux is disabled
#

You can check this change has taken effect by using the sestatus command again.

At that point the installation should be complete and you'll need to look at the getting started document for how to set up a WACS collection.