C. R. Zamana and others describe how they did their IB 6 installations

Red Hat 6.2

Installing IB on Linux is very easy, or, at least if compared to Oracle

Well, this is My Installation (TM):

Login as "root".
  1. Create the user/group "interbase"
  2. Install the package:
rpm -ivh InterBaseSS_...
  1. Add the "/opt/interbase/bin" to your PATH ( in /etc/profile, for example )
  2. Add the "localhost" to your /etc/hosts.equiv ( create it if necessary )
  3. Change the ownership of your IB installation:
chown -R interbase.interbase /opt/interbase
  1. Add the following line to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local to get the IB running when you reboot your machine:
/bin/su - interbase -c"/opt/interbase/bin/ibmgr -start > /dev/null"
  1. Enjoy.
Red Hat 7

Extra notes posted to newsgroup by José Antonio Akel S, forwarded by Frank Schlottmann-Gödde:

Here are all the tips to get it working on Red Hat 7:

  1. First, you have to install an older version of libncurses: libncurses.so.3 You can grab them from an older RedHat 6.x box, or from the RedHat FTP site.
  2. Install the update for glibc. You can download it from the RedHat FTP site also.
  3. If you are installing the Classic Server: since RedHat 7 comes with xinetd instead of inetd, you need to add the file
/etc/xinetd.d/ibase
 
and put the following lines on it:
----Start--------
service gds_db
{
socket_type = stream wait = no
user = root
server = /usr/local/sbin/gds_inet_server
log_on_failure += USERID
}
----End---------
  1. If you are installing the Super Server:
restart xinetd (/etc/init.d/xinted restart)
  1. Add the line "localhost" to the file "/etc/hosts.equiv". If the file doesn't exist, create it.
  2. Start the server doing
/opt/interbase/bin/ibguard &
  1. To connect, you should check that you are using the correct user/password:
/opt/interbase/bin/isql 'calama://database/dbecweb.gdb' -u sysdba -p masterkey
 
MORE NOTES FOR INSTALLING WITH xinetd

Mark O'Donohue, one of the Firebird Admins, emailed Ivo Panacek (Czechoslovakia) and Ivo sent some Redhat 7.0 xinetd scripts, with permission to use them at the Firebird project. You can get them by going to the notes on Firebird bug report list Bug #12433.

In summary, xinetd and inetd store config entries in DIFFERENT PLACES... Ivo wrItes: I'm switching to 7.0 on my workstations (home+office) mainly because my video card (Matrox G400 on both) work MUCH better under XFree4.0.1.

Difference between inetd and xinetd is simple: entries are not just lines in /etc/inetd.conf but files in /etc/xinet.d directory. So life with xinetd is more simple. You need just add two files on proper place and rpm --erase removes them itself. No patching in %post and %postun sections. Maybe it would be better to create separate RPM for RedHat 6.x and for RedHat 7.x.