[Triumf-linux-managers] Re: SL4: Seamonkey instructions

[Kel Raywood]

On Mon, 14 Aug 2006, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>Since there has been no activity from SL maintainers, I assume the
>failure we see is caused by something we do locally at TRIUMF ...

This is assessment is likely correct.  Do you change /etc/yum.conf ? In
particular, you should have "obsoletes=1" in the [main] section and _not_
override it in the [updates] section of the repository config in
/etc/yum/repos.d/ .

>... and I am now providing scripts to bring SL4 systems to a state where
>automatic yum updates would work again. ...
>
>... The first script fixes the yum failure cause by unsigned Java rpms
>(one hopes SUN will eventually start signing their RPMs).

If you have a local repository for the SUN RPMs, then you could just sign
them yourself.  That's what I do for unsigned RPMs.  It's straightforward
to create your own signing key and then use it on unsigned packages with
"rpm --sign <rpm-file>".  You could create a TRIUMF RPM-GPG-KEY and give
the private (signing) key to those at TRIUMF who create RPMs for sitewide
distribution.  The private-key is just like an ssh private-key and can be
protected by a passphrase.  Of course you would have to ensure that all
machines import your TRIUMF public-key.  This is easy to do at install
time if you use kickstart installations.

If you need help with any of this let me know.

Re Java
------

I use the IBM Java runtime and browser-plugin RPMs on all our machines and
have had no problem with them.  Redhat package these for RHEL-4 in their
extras channel so they are signed by RedHat and there's no extra tweaking
required to get them to work with RHEL-4 derived distros such as SL or
CentOS.  Up until now it was restricted to java-1.4.2 but in RHEL-4 update
4 that was released last week, java-1.5.0 RPMs are available for all
platforms (including ppc64).

If you don't have access to RHEL-Extras, you could use the java-1.5.0 RPMs 
from CentOS. See http://dev.centos.org/centos/4/testing/ which should also 
work out-of-the box with SL.

On x86_64 machines, I use the 32-bit mozilla and firefox packages and so
install the 32-bit java RPMs.  The main reason for this is that the flash
and acrobat-reader plugins are binary and 32-bit only.  People here
complain if their web-browser doesn't support java, flash and
acrobat-reader.

The flash and acrobat-reader plugins are also available in the extras 
channel.

Kel