Java Reference
In-Depth Information
20.8
I
NSTALLING
G
ERONIMO
Using a platform-neutral system like Java has both advantages and disadvan-
tages. A disadvantage is that, generally, Java products don't use the traditional
installation mechanisms of your native platform. For Linux users that means
that with Java you don't install using an RPM or a DEB. But this is somewhat
offset by the fact that all a Java application needs is for its classes (in JARs) to
be arranged in a particular pattern on the filesystem. In other words, all you
need to do to install Geronimo is to unpack the tarball.
You did the hard part already. Since you have created the group and made
yourself a member of that group (see Section 20.3), any member of the group
can install the product:
$ cd /usr/local
$ tar xzvf geronimo.tar.gz
...
$
TIP
At this point we suggest using one more Linux filesystem trick. The tarball
unpacks into a directory whose name includes the product version—in this
case,
geronimo-1.0-M1
. In many cases, you will want to be able to have
more than one version of Geronimo installed on a box simultaneously, either
because you need to port projects from one version to another, or perhaps
because you need to develop applications that will run on different versions on
different target servers. To make your life easier, create a symbolic link to a
generically named directory, such as
geronimo
and have that symlink point
to
geronimo-1.0-M1
. Then you can write your startup and shutdown scripts
to use the
geronimo
pathname. You can then switch to another version by
changing where the symlink points:
$ cd /usr/local
$ ln -s geronimo-1.0-M1/ geronimo
This process is discussed in detail in Section 6.2 in the context of switching
between Java SDK versions.
