Installing the NS Agent on Ubuntu Linux

By Jonathan Jesse

While Ubuntu is not a supported operating system by Altiris, the NS Agent can still be installed and Inventory can function correctly. Since Ubuntu does not use the RPM format for maintaining packages, software inventory will not be as complete as when run on a supported build of Linux. These instructions were written for Kubuntu 7.10, the latest version, but can be easily adopted for Ubuntu or any other supported version.
The first thing we need to do is to make sure we can ping the Notification Server. From the terminal, verify through ping, connectivity to the Notification Server. Once we can ping the server we will need to make sure the correct tools are installed. There is an RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) tool for Ubuntu that is not installed by default. From the terminal, type "sudo apt-get install RPM" and type in the administrator password, as the screen shot shows.

Click to view.
Select Y to install the packages.
The NS Agent cannot be pushed to Ubuntu for two reasons: 1. There is no root user enabled by default 2. SSH is not enabled by default. If we wanted to push to Ubuntu there are many changes to make, so we will do a pull install. Open up your web browser, if you are using Kubuntu it will be Konqueror, and navigate to the Altiris Unix/Linux Agent Download page which is found at http://SERVERNAME/UnixAgent/AltirisUnixAgentDownload.aspx?Id=56 which will look like the following:

Click to view.
Downloading and Installing
Follow these steps to download and execute the file for setup:
Click on the link to download the aex-bootstrap.gz file
Save it to the correct location (For this example it is saved in /home/USERNAME/
Open up a terminal session and navigate to the saved directory
Unzip the file by typing the command: gunzip aex-bootstrap.gz
Type the following command to change the file to allow execution: chmod u+x aex-bootstrap
Execute the aex-bootstrap utility by typing the following command: sudo ./aex-bootstrap http://SERVERNAME