January 29, 2003
Hang on tight… we’re going in.
What I’d really like to do is install Movable Type on my Cobalt Qube. As much as appreciate Blogger to handle the bulk of my blogging chores, there are times when I wish I had more flexibility. Flexibility and comments. Flexibility, comments, and a valid RSS feed. But that’s it. The Qube is a Linux box. Movable Type uses Perl. You’d think it this would be a no brainer. Yet, I shook my head and muttered to myself …
“It can’t be done. I don’t want to risk conking out the web-based administration tools by installing stuff that convolutes the system. Remember, I’ve still got to take care of the 900 Newted Community accounts on that box.”
There was a sigh and a virtual wave of a hand in my general direction, at once dismissing my concerns and offering encouragement. “You just can’t run MySQL on a MIPS-based Qube,” I added.
Well, actually you can, but it’s really messy.
Victor replied, “My new MT setup on chuma.org doesn’t use MySQL. Just Perl and DB_File. MT was designed to use this in order to be able to install it with just FTP access and appropriate CGI access. It’s really not hard, once all of the necessary Perl modules are installed and there aren’t too many.”
Well, that’s a different ball of wax. It almost sounds like something I can tackle on my own. “So, do those extra modules just slide into /usr/bin alongside perl?”, I impishly inquired. “Is it that simple? Something tells me no …” As you may be able to tell, I know just enough about Linux to be dangerous. But not enough to save my server from complete destruction.
Victor explained, “Not into /usr/bin, but usually into /usr/lib/perl or one of its look-alikes such as /usr/local/lib/perl. Installing extra Perl modules is easy. You can do it more than one way, of course, in the spirit of Perl. You can first download the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) module, and then invoke it to get a shell-like interface to installing and managing installed Perl modules. Once you install CPAN the manual way, at a command line you just have to:
# perl -MCPAN -e shell
and then, at the CPAN prompt:
cpan> install Foo::Bar
CPAN will automatically fetch the module’s tarball from the nearest mirror, and resolve dependencies by upgrading or installing other modules it depends on. Very nifty.”
Very nifty indeed, I thought. But let’s not get to far ahead of ourselves here. First I need to locate my Perl directory. Bingo!
/usr/lib/perl5
Oh, and look… CPAN is already installed.
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Sep 10 1999 CPAN-r--r--r-- 1 root root 115082 Oct 20 1998 CPAN.pm
Forget that manual install silliness. It looks like I’m cruising now and feeling brave. Let’s just go ahead a run CPAN and see what happens.
# perl -MCPAN -e shell
We have to reconfigure CPAN.pm due to following uninitialized parameters:
cpan_home, keep_source_where, build_dir, build_cache, index_expire, gzip, tar, unzip, make, pager, makepl_arg, make_arg, make_install_arg, urllist, inhibit_startup_message, ftp_proxy, http_proxy, no_proxy
/usr/lib/perl5/CPAN/Config.pm initialized.
The CPAN module needs a directory of its own to cache important index files and maybe keep a temporary mirror of CPAN files. This may be a site-wide directory or a personal directory.
First of all, I’d like to create this directory. Where?
CPAN build and cache directory? [/root/.cpan]
Yeah, ok. That’s sounds good. Just keep asking me questions, you friendly critter. And I’ll obligingly answer them. With little help from a second telnet session in order to help me remember where all the external programs like gzip and tar and make are hiding.
commit: wrote /usr/lib/perl5/CPAN/Config.pm
cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.3102)ReadLine support suppressed
cpan>
“Well, how about that?” … I exclaimed. And the server is still running too. Next, we’ll attempt to install the DB_File module and the whole can of Movable Type worms. Hold on to your Silly Putty, kids. The ride may get a bit bumpy.
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