Starting a Live Installation

Starting a Live Installation

It is not necessary to shut down the target system to perform a live installation. However, it is always advisable to warn other users to shut down applications that will be affected by the installation. During a live installation, Inst creates copies of some files that are held open by the operating system or by applications. For this reason, live installations usually require extra disk space temporarily.

To install software, you must start Inst as the superuser. If you start Inst as a regular user, you are assigned read-only permissions, which prevents you from making any changes to the installed software.

Use this command to start Inst from the command line of an IRIX shell:

% su
Password:
# inst

After your entry, the default location of the distribution is posted and the Inst Main menu is displayed (see Figure 4-2).

Note: When starting a live installation, you can use arguments to the inst command to modify the way that Inst operates. Some of these arguments are described in Chapter 6, "Inst for Experts." A complete list of inst arguments is given in the inst reference page.