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3. System Requirements

In this section you will see what hardware and software requirements must be met before you can install Ingres. The ingres user, would-be owner of the installation, makes a debut, too.

3.1 Hardware

According to the ReadMe, the minimal hardware capable of running Ingres is:

3.2 Software

Based again partly on the ReadMe, the following software elements must be present to install and run Ingres:

You can find a list of supported Linux distributions and versions here:

http://support.cai.com/techbases/ingres/linuxversions.html

3.3 The ingres User and II_SYSTEM

We need an account called ingres to install and run Ingres. He will own the installed software and only he can perform system management tasks such as starting and stopping Ingres. You shouldn't do any other work as ingres.

The ingres user may belong to any group. In the following example, we will create a separate group for him which will be called ingres, too.

The verified (therefore, recommended) shell for the ingres user is bash. All examples in this paper apply to this shell. If you use some other shell (which is probably just as fine), take into account the differences in syntax.

The binaries, shared libraries, configuration files and other files which make up the Ingres software, will be located in a tree structure after installation. You will set the root of this tree via the shell variable II_SYSTEM (to be exact, the root will be $II_SYSTEM/ingres) in the environment of the ingres user.

For the whole SDK, 60-odd Mb free space is needed under $II_SYSTEM/ingres.

If this is the first time you install Ingres, I suggest you keep the whole installation (the Ingres software, databases, backups, temporary areas, etc.) in one place so that you can find every component easily. If you have at least 150-200 Mb free space under $II_SYSTEM/ingres and you don't plan to create large databases (at least, not for some time), your system will work without problems. Should you at any later time run out of space, you will always have the possibility to relocate some of your databases to another partition.

In the following, I will assume that II_SYSTEM is set to /opt.

Logging in as root, execute the tasks mentioned above:


# mkdir /opt/ingres
# chmod 755 /opt/ingres
# groupadd -g 200 ingres
# useradd -g ingres -d /opt/ingres -s /bin/bash ingres
# chown ingres:ingres /opt/ingres
# passwd ingres

You can choose any Group ID that hasn't been allocated yet. It is practical to use a number greater than 100.

We set the home directory of ingres to /opt/ingres ($II_SYSTEM/ingres). This is not mandatory but convenient. We also granted ownership of the directory to ingres (that is compulsory).

Finally, put the following lines in the .profile file of ingres (or one of the other command files that start automatically at login):


umask 022 
export II_SYSTEM=/opt
export PATH=$II_SYSTEM/ingres/bin:$II_SYSTEM/ingres/utility:$PATH 
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib:/usr/lib:$II_SYSTEM/ingres/lib 
export ING_EDIT=/usr/bin/vi
if [ -n "$DISPLAY" ]
then 
   export TERM_INGRES=vt100fx
else 
  export TERM_INGRES=vt100f
fi

ING_EDIT sets the editor that can be called from Ingres utilities or application programs. Naturally, you can use any editor, not just vi. You must, however, specify the whole access path to the program. (If you stick to vi, check if it is under /usr/bin: it can be somewhere else in your system.) Take care: if the EDITOR shell variable is also set, it overrides the value of ING_EDIT.

Setting TERM_INGRES is necessary for the terminal to work properly. Forms-based Ingres utilities, such as the install program itself, and also applications created with traditional Ingres development tools (ABF, Vision) make heavy use of function keys. The .profile above sets TERM_INGRES according to the terminal type (VT100-like or X).

These settings must be included in the .profile of every user that will be granted access to the Ingres installation.


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