Installing Your Workstation
In order to have a working copy of &TCAR; in your workstation,
the first step you need to follow is pick up a computer and
install an operating system in it. This computer will be named
the workstation from now on.
At the moment of chosing which operating system to install in
your workstation, consider that &TCAR; is completly built on
&TCD; and realies on it to achieve most automation tasks. At
time of this writing the major release 5 update 5 of &TCD; was
used as platform to support all work line development inside
&TCAR;. To get the best of &TCAR;, it is necessary that you
too, use the same operating system we did to develop it.
To install &TCD; you need to have access to the installation
media somehow (e.g., CDs, DVDs, Pendrives, etc.). If you
don't have the installation media of &TCD;, you need to
download the ISO files related to the installation media you
plan to use (e.g., CD or DVD) and then create the installation
media by yourself. &TCD; ISO files can be downloaded from
&TCM;.
Assuming you downloaded the DVD ISO of &TCD;, you can burn it
using the K3B application and, this
way, you are creating the installation media you are in need
of. Of course, in order to download the ISO files and create
the installation media, you need to have a workstation already
functionality where you can realized such tasks. If this is
the first time for you and see yourself into much troubles
here, talk to the guys in your nearest LUG, or simply send a
mail to &TCML; where you'll surely have the answer you need.
Once you have the installation media on your hands, the
installation process of &TCD; is rather straightforward. To
begin, you put the installation media in your media reader,
boot the computer from it, and follow the installer
intructions till it completes all the steps. That simple.
The Partition Information
The partition information you set in your workstation is very
specific to your personal needs and the technical
characteristics of your machine. This information will also
set the bases of all deployment you reach to achieve inside
the workstation. A well partitioned workstation is crucial to
garantee a well distribution of space inside the worstation.
In order to provide an idea of this installation step, I'll
describe the specific partitioning of the machine I use to
develop &TCAR; right now. Remember that your needs might be
differents and so the partition layout you should implement.
The machine of our example is isolated from Internet or any
other network. It has two hard drives of 256GB each, 2GB of
RAM and a 2.80GHz Core 2 Duo processor. The main goal of this
machine is producing &TCAR;. To represent the real production
environment of &TCAR;, this machine was conceived to have two
roles, one as server —to store the source repository of
&TCAR;— and one as client —to store a working copy
of the source repository—. From both hard drives
available, one is used as primary
(/dev/sda) and the other one as secondary
(/dev/sdb) where the secondary is used
only to backup the information produced in the primary by mean
of backup scripts.
The partition distribution of this machine implements the
default partinioning schema provided by &TCD; in the primary
hard drive to store partitions needed by the operating system
(e.g., /, /boot and swap partition) where
the working copy is placed in. The second hard drive is an
entire partition mounted in /mnt/backups automatically on
boot which only purpose is to duplicate the information
produced in the workplace.
Filesystem Type Size Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 ext3 239G /
/dev/sda1 ext3 104M /boot
tmpfs tmpfs 1.1G /dev/shm
/dev/sdb ext3 247G /mnt/backups
The detailed steps followed to prepare the partinioning layout
described above are described in the Deployment
Guide provided by
Deployment_Guide-en-US-5.2-11.el5.centos
package.
The Packages Selection
The packages selection lets you to specify which software does
your workstation will have once it be installed. In this step,
you need to select the following groups of packages:
Desktop Environments
GNOME Desktop Environment
KDE (K Desktop Environment)
Applications
Authoring and Publishing
Editors
Graphical Internet
Graphics
Office/Productivity
Text-based Internet
Development
Development Libraries
Development Tools
GNOME Software Development
KDE Software Development
Packages selected in this step provide a base selection of all
the packages you need in order to have a functional working
copy of &TCAR;. The only exception for this, is the
inkscape package and some of its
dependencies which doesn't come with &TCD; and need to be
installed from third party repositroies like EPEL and
RPMForge. The configuration of third party repository is done
later, once the workstation has been installed; just as
described in the Repositories
page.