Installation/Amanda's Requirements

Amanda can optionally make use of the following packages to back up different types of clients or clients with different filesystem dumping programs.

• GNU-tar: Use GNU tar 1.15 or later version on Amanda clients. Earlier versions of GNU tar (some versions of 1.13 and 1.14) are known to have problems.

GNU tar can be downloaded from http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/tar.html#downloading

• Samba: Samba allows Unix systems to talk to Windows clients. Amanda can back up Microsoft Windows clients using samba. Read the Windows client section of Backup client for configuration tips and known limitations.

• Perl: As of version 2.6.0, Amanda is partially written in perl, and requires Perl 5.6.0 or later.

http://www.perl.org/get.html.

• Glib: As of version 2.6.0, Amanda requires Glib version 2.2.0 or later. Note that this is a fairly old version of the library -- most up to date packaging systems have versions around 2.13.0. Glib is part of GTK+ and can be downloaded through http://www.gtk.org/ or directly from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/glib/2.18/

• Awk: One of the programs included in this package is amplot(8), which reads a data file that Amanda generates for each dump and translates that information in it into a nice picture that can be used to determine how your installation is doing and if any parameters need to be changed. To use amplot, you need a version of awk that understands command line variable substitutions, such as nawk or gawk, which is available from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gawk/gawk-3.1.1.tar.gz

• GNUplot: amplot(8) also required that gnuplot be installed on your system. Gnuplot is available at ftp://ftp.gnuplot.info/pub/gnuplot

• readline library: amrecover(8) command optionally uses the readline library for its command-line edition mechanisms. (If you use an RPM-based distribution, check for the package readline-devel-X.Y.rpm.) This library itself requires either termcap, curses or ncurses. termcap is preferred, and both libraries can be obtained from:
  • ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/readline/readline-5.0.tar.gz
  • ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/termcap/termcap-1.3.1.tar.gz

• Build tools (autoconf, automake, bison): If you are an Amanda developer, see Development Dependencies for the build tools you will need.