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Running Dell OMSA 6.3 under Debian Lenny


Earlier this year Dell finally announced a version of their OpenManage Server Administrator suite for Ubuntu systems. This means that there's now an officially-maintained version of OMSA compiled and packaged for a Debian-like system. There are two main limitations with the current release, as it relates to Debian: 1) It's compiled for Ubuntu 9.10, which while pretty similar to Debian Lenny, does introduce some problems when trying to install these packages on Debian; and 2) Only amd64 packages were released.
Below are instructions for getting these packages to run under a Debian Lenny i386 system that is using an x86_64 kernel (if your Dell system doesn't support a 64-bit kernel then you won't be able to run these OMSA packages). Unfortunately the packages have a few dependencies on libraries that only exist in Debian Squeeze and not in Debian Lenny. Rather than doing lots of backporting, the easiest solution is to create a Squeeze chroot and run OMSA from there.