In the spirit of the Linux community, Red Hat Software has made available their Linux distributions for several platforms on their FTP site. These are all available from the top distribution directory.
The toplevel directory for RedHat Linux release 5.1 ( pub/redhat/redhat-5.1) contains distributions for the different platforms, and a directory containing updates and corrections to program packages that have been published since the release.
SRPMS/ alpha/ i386/ sparc/ updates/
In this document, we use the i386 distribution as an example. The procedure given in this document is likely to work on all platforms supported by Red Hat (Alpha, SPARC, ppc, etc.), but we have only tested it on the i386 platform (the authors would be most interested in additional information). The root of the i386 directory looks like this:
-rw-r--r-- 8 ftpuser ftpusers 19686 May 27 1997 COPYING
-rw-r--r-- 1 ftpuser ftpusers 3023 May 7 09:58 README
-rw-r--r-- 10 ftpuser ftpusers 2751 Sep 18 1997 RPM-PGP-KEY
drwxr-xr-x 5 ftpuser ftpusers 96 Jul 15 08:34 RedHat/
drwxr-xr-x 5 ftpuser ftpusers 8192 Jul 15 08:35 doc/
drwxr-xr-x 5 ftpuser ftpusers 8192 Jul 15 08:35 dosutils/
drwxr-xr-x 5 ftpuser ftpusers 8192 Jul 15 08:33 gnome/
drwxr-xr-x 2 ftpuser ftpusers 96 Jun 7 02:47 images/
drwxr-xr-x 4 ftpuser ftpusers 96 Jun 5 12:24 misc/
The doc directory contains an abundance of information. Most
importantly, the RedHat installation manual can be found in HTML
format in the directory
doc/rhmanual/manual/. Next, there is a number of FAQs, and
finally, the entire collection of HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs.
The images directory contains boot floppy images that must be copied
to a diskette. In the most recent distribution (5.1), there are two disk
images available. The boot image is called boot.img, which is required
when installation is performed directly from a CD-ROM. If installation
from a local hard disk, NFS mounted disk or FTP is required, the
supplementary disk image supp.img might be needed. See section
Installing from the CD and references therein for
details.
The misc directory contains source and executables of a number of
programs needed for the installation.
The most important part of the directory tree is rooted in the RedHat
directory:
drwxr-xr-x 2 ftpuser ftpusers 24576 Jul 15 08:35 RPMS/
drwxr-xr-x 2 ftpuser ftpusers 8192 Jul 15 08:32 base/
-rw-rw-rw- 59 ftpuser ftpusers 0 Aug 15 14:21 i386
drwxr-xr-x 4 ftpuser ftpusers 96 Jun 5 12:24 instimage/
The RPMS directory contains the major part of the Red Hat distribution
consisting of a set of RPM (Redhat Package Manager) files. An RPM package
typically contains binary executables, along with relevant configuration
files and documentation. See the section
RPM packages for more information.
The base directory holds different book-keeping files needed
during the installation process, e.g. the comps file, which
defines the components (groups of packages) used during the
"Choose packages to install" phase. Another important file in the
base directory is the hdlist file containing most of the
header fields from all the RPMs in the RPMS directory.
This means that all the interdependencies among RPM packages can be
determined just by reading hdlist without having to read all the
RPM packages which is quite convenient especially during FTP installs.
Another use of hdlist is mapping package names to file name,
eg. perl to perl-5.004-6.i386.rpm. This means that if you
want to incorporate updates from RedHat (see section
Incorporating the updates) or add your own
packages to the RPMS directory, you need to update hdlist.
This is descriped later in
Generating a new hdlist file.
The instimage directory contains a bare-bones live file system with a
number of programs and shared libraries needed during the installation
procedure.