These instructions apply to all Redhat distros and their clones, including but not limited to: Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux, and others. While the installation instructions are the same for each distro, the reason why one might use one distro over the other is different. A short description follows, which is intended to help you chose what distro best fits your needs.
These distributions are classified as enterprise operating systems and have a long operating lifetime of many years. By design, they will not have the latest and greatest versions of any package. Instead, stable packages are the emphasis.
Replacing any core package in these distributions with a newer package from a third party is expressly verboten. The ZoneMinder development team will not do this, and neither should you. If you have the perception that you've got to have a newer version of mysql, gnome, apache, etc. then, rather than upgrade these packages, you should instead consider using a different distribution such as Fedora.
The ZoneMinder team will not provide support for systems which have had any core package replaced with a package from a third party.
Background: Fedora
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One can think of Fedora as RHEL or CentOS Beta. This is in fact, what it is. Fedora is primarily geared towards development and testing of newer, sometimes bleeding edge, packages. The ZoneMinder team uses this distro to determine the interoperability of ZoneMinder with the latest and greatest versions of packages like mysql, apache, systemd, and others. If a problem is detected, it will be addressed long before it makes it way into RHEL.
Fedora has a short life-cycle of just 6 months. However, Fedora, and consequently ZoneMinder, is available on armv7 architecture. Rejoice, Raspberry Pi users!
Zmrepo is a turn key solution. It will install all of ZoneMinder's dependencies for you. This is the easiest and the recommended way to install ZoneMinder on any system running a Redhat based distribution.
- Zmrepo assumes you have installed the underlying distrubution **using the official installation media for that distro**. Third party "Spins" are not supported and may not work correctly.
- ZoneMinder is intended to be installed in an environment dedicated to ZoneMinder. While ZoneMinder will play well with many applications, but some invariably will not. Astericks is one such example.
- Be advised that you need to start with a clean system before using zmrepo.
- If you have previously installed ZoneMinder from-source, then your system is **NOT** clean. You must manually search for and delete all ZoneMinder related files before using zmrepo (look under /usr/local). Make uninstall helps, but it will not do this for you correctly. You WILL have problems if you ignore this step.
- It is not necessary, and not recommended, to install a LAMP stack ahead of time.
- Disable other third party repos and uninstall any of ZoneMinder's third party dependencies, which might already be on the system, especially ffmpeg and vlc. Attempting to install dependencies yourself often causes problems.
- Each ZoneMinder rpm includes a README file under /usr/share/doc. You must follow the all steps in this README file, precisely, each and every time ZoneMinder is installed or upgraded. **Failure to do so is guaranteed to result in a non-functional system.**
If you are looking to do development or the packages in zmrepo just don't suit you, then you should follow these steps to learn how to build your own ZoneMinder RPM.
The following method documents how to build ZoneMinder into an RPM package, compatible with Fedora, Redhat, CentOS, and other compatible clones. This is exactly how the RPMS in zmrepo are built.
- Troubleshooting becomes easier if we are all building ZoneMinder the same way.
The build instructions below make use of a custom script called "buildzm.sh". Advanced users are encouraged to view the contents of this script. Notice that the script doesn't really do a whole lot. The goal of the script is to simply make the process a little easier for the first time user. Once you become familar with the build process, you can issue the mock commands found in the buildzm.sh script yourself if you so desire.
***IMPORTANT***
Certain commands in these instructions require root privileges while other commands do not. Pay close attention to this. If the instructions below state to issue a command without a “sudo” prefix, then you should *not* be root while issuing the command. Getting this incorrect will result in a failed build.
Before you begin, set up an rpmbuild environment by following `this guide <http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/SetupRpmBuildEnvironment>`_ by the CentOS developers.
To continue, you need a ZoneMinder SRPM. For starters, let's use one of the SRPMS from zmrepo. Go browse the `Zmrepo <http://zmrepo.zoneminder.com/>`_ site and choose an appropriate SRPM and place it into the ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS folder.
You choose the config file based on the desired distro (e.g. el6, el7, f20, f21) and basearch (e.g. x86, x86_64, arhmhfp). Notice that, when specifying the Mock config as a commandline parameter, you should leave off the ".cfg" filename extension.
Once the build completes, you will be presented with a folder containing the RPM's that were built. Copy the newly built ZoneMinder RPM to the desired system, enable zmrepo per the instruction on the `Zmrepo <http://zmrepo.zoneminder.com/>`_
website, and then install the rpm by issuing the appropriate yum install command. Finish the installation by following the zoneminder setup instructions in the distro specific readme file, named README.{distroname}, which will be installed into the /usr/share/doc/zoneminder* folder.
Finally, you may want to consider editing the zmrepo repo file under /etc/yum.repos.d and placing an “exclude=zoneminder*” line into the config file. This will prevent your system from overwriting your manually built RPM with the ZoneMinder RPM found in the repo.
Before attempting this part of the instructions, make sure and follow the previous instructions for building one of the unmodified SRPMS from zmrepo. Knowing this part works will assist in troubleshooting should something go wrong.
These instructions may vary depending on what exactly you want to do. The following example assumes you want to build a development snapshot from the master branch.
From the previous instructions, we downloaded a CentOS 7 ZoneMinder SRPM and placed it into ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS. For this example, install it onto your system:
The tarball from the previsouly installed SRPM should be there. This is the name we will use. For this example, the name is ZoneMinder-1.28.1.tar.gz. From one folder above the local ZoneMinder git repository, execute the following:
This step will overwrite the SRPM you originally downloaded, so you may want to back it up prior to completing this step. Note that the name of the specfile will vary slightly depending on what distro you are building for.
You should now have a a new SRPM under ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS. In our example, the SRPM is called zoneminder-1.28.1-2.el7.centos.src.rpm. Now follow the previous instructions that describe how to use the buildzm script, using ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/zoneminder-1.28.1-2.el7.centos.src.rpm as the path to your SRPM.
