ACS Quick Start Guide

Install and run ACS on Linux Red Enterprise 4 update 1 (or also Scientific Linux) in a few easy steps!

ACS contains also the ALMA Archive already integrated in the provided ACSROOT.

Requirements

Red Hat Enterprise / Scientific Linux

Instructions to install and configure Red Hat Enterprise or Scientific Linux for usage with ACS are available here:

http://almasw.hq.eso.org/almasw/bin/view/ACS/RHEL4InstProcedure

You can also get fom us a ready to install CD with all needed rpm packages and kikstart configuration.

Red Hat 9

The best is to perform a Full Server type installation of the operating system.

A proper Linux installation procedure can be found in the

ESO Common Software Linux Installation Manual

During the transition from RH 9 to RH Enterprise we will support ACS installation also on RH 9, using mostly the tools for ACS 4.1.

If you want to install on a RH 9 machine and if you didn't perform a full installation, be aware that you must have the following packages installed:

    pdksh 5.2.14-13
    glibc-devel 2.2.4-13
    kernel-source 2.4.7-10
    tcl and tk-8.4
  (versions as indicated above or higher)

A RH 9.0 installation from the orginal distribution has to be patched with at least the following two patches:

• glibc: rpm –Uvh glib*.rpm (needed: glibc-2.3.2-27.9.i686.rpm and glibc-common-2.3.2-27.9.i386.rpm)
  If you have glibc development packages installed, you need also the following packages:
  • glibc-debug-2.3.2-27.9.7.i386.rpm
  • glibc-devel-2.3.2-27.9.7.i386.rpm
  • glibc-utils-2.3.2-27.9.7.i386.rpm
• kernel: rpm –ivh kernel-2.4.20-28.9.i686.rpm (needed: kernel-2.4.20-28.9.i686.rpm)

For more details and to download these patches look at the following wiki discussion:

• ALMASW.ACS.RedHat9

If some one doesn't want to use patches she/he has to set the environment variable LD_ASSUME_KERNEL to 2.4.18 (export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.18), but without these patches you might have problems with other applications.

The package includes a binary installation of gcc 3.4.1 and it is not necessary to have the compiler pre-installed..

Create the /alma directory

This directory must exist in order to use the binary distribution of the GNU tools and tcl/tk contained in the ACS binaries, but it can be a symbolic link, like /alma -> /scratch/amchavan/alma/, but it must be in the root directory and it must point to a directory writable by you. If you are re-installing the same major.minor version of ACS, first clean up the old installation or back it up, for example:

> rm -rf /alma/ACS-6.0

You will need approx. 1.6GByte of disk space.
If you don'y have root privileges you'll need to ask your sysadmin to create the /alma directory (or link) for you.

Retrieve the installation tarball

Download the ACS installation LGPL for (ACS.tar.gz) or the NO-LGPL + RTOS (requires access password) where you have another 1 GByte of available disk space.

These files contain a corresponding full installation of ACS built with no debugging options.

Install ACS

Very easy:

where <...> is the path to the downloaded installation file. This will create and populate the /alma/ACS-6.0.

Note:
If you are upgrading a pre-existing ACS installation, do not forget to remove any INTROOT you might have. You will need to create a new clean INTROOT after the upgrade.

Set up your ACS developent environment

Again quite easy: get the file defining the environment and source it.

Note: you must be using bash for this step (or convert the bash files into your own preferred shell).

You can also include the sourcing in your session startup file, or define an alias like

Verify your ACS installation

You can now perform a number of steps to verify if the installation was successfully completed. The steps include starting a number of services and two interactive clients; if all goes well, you should see no error messages in the console logs.

• Make sure your DISPLAY variable is correctly set.
• Open a terminal window, source your ACS profile, and launch the

command.

• Open another terminal window, source your ACS profile again, and launch the following sequence of commands.

The two last lines launch interactive applications you can play with.

Shutdown ACS

• Exit the two interactive applications.
• Launch the following command from the second terminal window to shutdown the whole ACS.

Note that some exceptions may be generated upon shutdown, like
2003-02-20T16:53:42.503 (7905|1024) EXCEPTION, (maci::ManagerImpl::unbind) Unable to unbind object...
Such exceptions may or may not be a problem; the above example shows a non-critical error.

Download ACS sources

This binary distribution does not contain sources.

Sources can be extracted from CVS or downloaded from the CD directory strucure.
The file ACSsources.tar.gz (35Mb) contains the sources.

Upgrade from LGPL to NO-LGPL

The public binary distribution is LGPL. Binary NO-LGPL distributions are available only internally.
If you want to upgrade or simply build the NO-LGPL tools, download the ACS NO-LGPL sources from the full installation, NO-LGPL directory tree (using proper login and PWD):

http://www.eso.org/~almamgr/AlmaAcs/Releases/DevelopmentHead/Distribution/Linux-NO-LGPL/ACSsources.tar.gz

and issue the following commands:

If you want also to build the modules to support real time linux, add also the modules NO-LGPL/rtos/rtdevio and NO-LGPL/rtos/rtlog to the list:

For more details about RTOS installation and issues look at the "ACS RTAI FAQs" ACS FAQ.

If you are upgrading a machine that uses DHCP

If you are upgrading a machine that uses DHCP and is configured to use the acsDHCPBoot script, check your /etc/rc.d/init.d file and update there the path to the acsDHCPBoot file for the new ACS version.

For more details look at the "How do I setup DHCP" ACS FAQ and at the acsDHCPBoot man page.