Installing via ssh

corblimey

If I got ssh access to a server, how easy is it to install additional packages? Is it just a case of downloading the file, ftp'ing it to the server and then installing it via ssh? How do I determine what 'flavour' of unix is being used and hence how to install? Am I going to end up installing from source a lot?

As you can see, I'm clueless, so any sort of primer or intro to the world of ssh and unix would be helpful.

ethernet

Is this the VPS you were looking at in the other thread? If so, you might have a choice of distro. It's quite likely you'll end up with Red Hat EL or a spin-off (CentOS and others) or a Debian derivative.

Assuming you have root access, you can use the package manager, such as aptitude (apt-get install, purge and so on), zypper, yum and more.

Might be best to avoid installing from source. Yes, there's a thrill from it but it would be best on a production server to have the latest security patches and upgrades coming downstream from the distribution's official repositories.

A quick and dirty way of finding out what flavour is to do: uname -a

corblimey

Thanks, ethernet, yeah it's the recomendation that was made and then removed. They offer ssh access to the root (I'm sure others do this aswell) so I'm just checking that if I need to install a package like this one, I have the ability to do so. How would you go about installing xpdf via ssh, for example?

ethernet

Using shared hosting myself. Need to send an email to get someone to change ownership on files!

Xpdf you say? I'm only familiar with it as a graphical PDF viewer. Will you be installing a graphical desktop environment on top on that system then, such as Gnome or KDE to enable you to use this application over remote desktop/VPN?

corblimey

No not really, I just chose it as an example of how to do it. If I can download the .rpm file from there (assuming a red hat based distro) but what then?

1. I access the root via ssh
2. How do I upload the file manually (since ftp'ing would be tied to my user account and thus would only give access to my usr directory)?
3. Once that's done, thought, things fall apart. I've only ever installed via the Ubuntu package manager which does everything, so moving to a CLI is beyond me. If the package is called xpdf.rpm is the command you list above enough to get things installed? apt-get install xpdf?

(Note: the install instructions for xpdf are different in that you can download the precompiled binaries and apparently just copy them to usr/bin, but I'm trying to work this thing in general rather than specifically)

ethernet

/usr should be in your path so dropping the xpdf executable in there should work, as you describe.

However, I reiterate that using the package manager is the best.

For Red Hat-based distros, you can do:

yum install somePackage

This page may act as a handy reference between the various package managers.

Orion

corblimey wrote: »

2. How do I upload the file manually (since ftp'ing would be tied to my user account and thus would only give access to my usr directory)?

Use WGET to pull the file directly from the net.

ethernet

Macros42 wrote: »

Use WGET to pull the file directly from the net.

Lynx is handy to have installed if the site is trying to be all fancy using some script to determine your location to give you the appropriate mirror.

Orion

true. Also handy if a site doesn't give you a direct download link and tries to be all clever using a form to download.