me

Running Dell OMSA 6.5 under Debian Lenny

Following on from my earlier post about OMSA 6.3, here are updated instructions for OMSA 6.5 on Lenny. If you've read the earlier post, here's what's new:

  • Of course, targets OMSA 6.5 instead of 6.3. The only meaningful change in the process is that there's no more need to hack around the smbios package dependencies.
  • I opted to use schroot to make a few things easier. You can still use plain chroot if you'd prefer, but the necessary changes to my instructions are left as an exercise for the reader.
  • Added notes on a pure 32-bit install.
  • I ran into some issues upgrading from OMSA 6.3 to 6.5. So I completely removed the old 6.3 installation and installed 6.5 from scratch. If upgrading (via the usual "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" sequence inside the chroot) works for you, please let me know in the comments.

As before, the OMSA packages target Ubuntu 9.10. The good news is they now target Debian Squeeze as well (using the same 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.

Below are instructions for getting these packages to run under a Debian Lenny i386 system that is using an x86_64 kernel. Note that Dell now provides 32-bit OMSA packages as well. However, they will only work if your system is completely 32-bit (i.e. 32-bit userland AND 32-bit kernel). I am running 32-bit userland with a 64-bit kernel, so I still had to install the 64-bit versions of the packages. If you are running a completely 32-bit Lenny system, the below instructions should mostly still work (though I haven't tried this combination). You'll just need to substitute "i386" everywhere you see "amd64".