MySQL and DBI installation

Preparing your system for NOMAD

In order to use NOMAD you'll have to install some software onto your linux box. NOMAD utilizes many different kinds of software that exist on Linux systems. Some of the components are standard (i.e. included on a bare system) others need to be downloaded and installed fresh. Perl is standard but NOMAD depends on certain enhancements that are not part of the standard Perl distribution. While NOMAD was designed using RedHat Linux, it will work with any linux distribution as long as you're running MySQL and have the Perl DBI package installed. If your system is RedHat 5 or RedHat 6 you'll have to follow the scheme below. If you have RedHat 7 you're in luck because MySQL is distributed with the system, and you can either install it up front when you install the system, or use rpm to install it from your RedHat CD.

The things you'll be installing are MySQL and DBI. MySQL is a relational database that is free, available, and excellent for building database backed websites, among other things. DBI is a Database Interface module for Perl that allows you to use Perl for interacting with a database system.

There are at least two basic ways to install MySQL on your system.

METHOD 1 - rpm rpm stands for redhat package manager, and is by far the easiest way to install MySQL. This is the recommended installation procedure.

METHOD 2 - tarball This is the more traditional way of installing software on UNIX computers, and is also more complicated. It's a pre-compiled binary, but requires some setting up.

Method one is by far the preferred and easiest method. It does everything for you. rpm is an open standard and works on many systems, not just redhat. Once MySQL is installed, you can proceed to update your perl distribution with DBI as described below.

Installing DBI

The Perl DBI package allows you to use the Perl programming language to access and manipulate databases. DBI is just one of the things you'll need to add to Perl. You'll actually be adding 4 packages to your Perl distribution so you can use DBI. They are:

Data-Dumper
Data-ShowTable
DBI
Msql-Mysql-modules

Each of these modules is available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, affectionately known as CPAN (www.cpan.org). You can go there and look for the modules by name. (For example from your command line try: lynx http://www.cpan.org/ when you find the module you're looking for use d for download). Once you find the modules you're looking for you can unpack and install them.

gunzip Data-ShowTable-3.3.tar.gz 
tar -xvf Data-ShowTable-3.3.tar
cd Data-ShowTable-3.3

It's a good idea to read the README file, but the basic routine for installing a module is to issue the following commands:

perl Makefile.PL 
make
make test
make install

If all is successful you can remove the installation directory:

cd ../
rm -rf Data-ShowTable-3.3

That's the general idea. Now do he same for the DBI DBI-1.14.tar.gz Make sure the server is running, because the next module installation will be testing the server. Msql-Mysql-modules-1.2215.tar.gz install just the MySQL

METHOD 1 - rpm	rpm stands for redhat package manager, and is by far the easiest way to install MySQL. This is the recommended installation procedure.
METHOD 2 - tarball	This is the more traditional way of installing software on UNIX computers, and is also more complicated. It's a pre-compiled binary, but requires some setting up.