[cobalt-users] Introduction, Cobalt Linux distro questions

["John A. Federico" <cobalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings, everyone.

My name is John Federico, based in Maplewood, NJ (20 minutes outside of
NYC).

I'm new to the Cobalt community (3 weeks) and this list (1 week) and find
myself a wee bit frustrated with my current understanding of the way
things work in Sun/Cobalt-land.

I'm a newbie when it comes to RaQ's, but not to Linux. I've been running
it since the early Slackware days, when the supported hardware list was
equal to a single 8.5 x 11 typewritten page.

Of course, I'm not a formally trained technologist - I'm half-geek...on
my mother's side. My profession would be listed as "marketer", but I have
a good working knowledge of IT.

Enough about me...

I purchased a used 3i. After some hardware maintenance (fans, dust
removal, etc.) it works great. I upgraded to the RaQ 4 OS which was an
amazingly simple experience. (Thanks to Alex Bajan of RaQport for his
help.)

I've been poring over every bit of documentation and gathering
all the knowledge I can find - docs, webhostingtalk.com, this list,
usenet, etc. but am still confused by a few simple things.

For instance, if I download, burn and install an OS from an ISO,
shouldn't that ISO be up-to-date with all of the patches, thusfar. (I
mean, logically...) There's no dated README contained in the bootable ISO
and the README in the FTP directory functions only to correlate the file
names with the appropriate RaQ model.

For instance, I'm trying to install openSSH from a .pkg file. (Found on
pkgmaster) Dependencies list "Latest OS Update". Fine. I just installed
the OS from the Sun FTP site, so I should be OK (in theory).

However, I receive an error during installation, with no specific error
messages or codes. Does that mean that I *don't* have the latest OS update
installed from the ISO? I haven't found any affirming information.

Granted, it could be something else entirely, but I don't want to go
mucking about with OS updates if I don't have to.

(Hmmph. I never had these concerns with RPM's.)

Another quirky problem: I installed mySQL from .pkg file. Installation
went well, mysqld started automatically. Wonderful. However, a good number
of the config files are not found where the mySQL documentation says they
should be. Granted, I found them, just someplace completely different.
What's up with that?

So, it's those kinds of things that are confusing me - the somewhat quirky
Cobalt distro of Linux.

(If there were a "Cobalt for Dummies Book", I'd buy it...)

I'm trying to get this box set up with the environment I need, make it
relatively secure and get it into the data center by October 1st, so any
general (or specific) pointers (outside of the great pointers I've already
gotten from the archives) would be helpful.

Thanks in advance. Feel free to respond off list.

Regards,

-jf.

John Federico | President & Founder | The Free Agent Forum
Vox/Fax: +1 888 696 1768
http://www.FreeAgentForum.com