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 6.0 ( pub/redhat/redhat-6.0) 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/
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-- 1 root root 18391 Mar 19 1999 COPYING
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3187 Apr 19 19:56 README
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2751 Sep 19 1997 RPM-PGP-KEY
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 1024 Sep 12 08:03 RedHat/
-rwxr--r-- 1 root root 2048 Apr 20 14:33 boot.cat
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 1024 Sep 17 08:04 doc/
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 1024 Aug 3 16:17 dosutils/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Aug 3 16:02 images/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 222789 Sep 17 08:04 ls-lR
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32371 Sep 17 08:04 ls-lR.gz
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 1024 Sep 17 08:04 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 (6.0), 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 root root 23552 Aug 3 16:02 RPMS/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Aug 3 16:02 base/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 19 1999 i386
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 1024 Sep 11 08:03 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. See section
The comps file
for more information on this file, and how to use it. 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.
The /pub/redhat/updates directory has updates for all releases of
RedHat's distribution since version 3.0.3. This is the place to find
software packages that have been uppdated for some reason or other. You
should especially be aware of security updates. These are publicised on
RedHat's errata page whenever a fix is available. The most important
files found in the updates directory are:
drwxrwxr-x 8 ftpuser ftpusers 8192 Aug 18 08:05 5.1/
drwxrwxr-x 9 ftpuser ftpusers 8192 Sep 18 08:07 5.2/
drwxrwxr-x 9 ftpuser ftpusers 8192 Sep 18 08:07 6.0/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ftpuser ftpusers 3 Aug 25 13:14 current -> 6.0/
The structure of each of these directories is similar to that described in section The top level directory