Since the bash utility is available on such a wide variety of platforms, Paul has made it his shell scripting language of choice. You can determine if your system has bash installed properly using the following command:

[pkb@salsa common] /bin/bash --version
GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i386-redhat-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
[pkb@salsa common] 

If your system doesn't have bash installed, additional information on installing bash can be found in the Third Party Software chapter.

You will need a Java run time environment (version 1.4.2 or later). This package includes the org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process class, which enables one to apply XSL style sheets to XML documents allowing us to translate XML source files into other useful entities. It may be possible to use an earlier version of the Java run time environment, however, it will be up to you locate and install the Xalan-Java package yourself (you will be on your own).

You can use the following command to determine what version of Java you have installed on your system:

[pkb@salsa common] java -version
java version "1.4.2_02"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_02-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2_02-b03, mixed mode)
[pkb@salsa common] 

If your system indicates that you have a version of Java installed that is 1.4 or higher, they you are probably set to go. You can further test this by verifying that the org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process class is available for applying XSL templates to XML documents by using the following command:

[pkb@salsa common] java org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process
Xalan-J command line Process class options:

			-Common Options-

   [-XSLTC (use XSLTC for transformation)]
   [-IN inputXMLURL]
   [-XSL XSLTransformationURL]

... bunch more output - you'll have to hit return a couple of times ...

   [-XX (turns on additional debugging message output)]
   [-XT (use translet to transform if possible)]
[pkb@salsa common] 

If the above test produces an error message (typically something containing java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError), then you will need to update your Java run time environment. Additional information related to installing the Java 2 Software Edition can be found in the Third Party Software chapter.

When processing XML documents, validation is often desirable. Validation is done against the XML document's associated DTD or XML Schema. There is typically one public location for a DTD or XML Schema file (think Internet here). Often it is desirable to have a local copy of the schema available on your system. Having a local copy means you won't need to access the Internet when you process your XML documents. This makes things run quicker (and avoids the Internet dependency - and proxy server setup issues).

The xml-commons-resolver package provides a mechanism to read catalog files telling the XLST process where it can find DTD and XML Schema files on the local system. If not found on the local system, the XLST process should then still fall back to pulling it from the Internet.

You can use the following command to determine if you have the xml-commons-resolver package properly installed (you should not see an error message):

[pkb@salsa common] java org.apache.xml.resolver.Version
XmlResolver 1.0
[pkb@salsa common] 

If the above test produces an error message (typically something containing java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError), then you will need to install the xml-commons-resolver package on your system. This involves creating a lib/endorsed directory under your Java run time direcorty (if it doesn't already exist), and then placing the necessary JAR file (found at http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/xml-resolver/jars/xml-resolver-1.1.jar) in the lib/endorsed directory. Assuming the path to your Java run time environment is /opt/j2sdk1.4.2_03/jre, then the installation of this package can be done in the following manner (assuming you have the wget utility properly installed and configured for your system):

[pkb@guacamole keyval]$ su -
Password:
bash-2.03# cd /opt/j2sdk1.4.2_03/jre/lib
bash-2.03# if [ ! -d endorsed ]; then mkdir endorsed; fi
bash-2.03# cd endorsed
bash-2.03# wget -nd -nH http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/xml-resolver/jars/xml-resolver-1.1.jar
--09:56:23--  http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/xml-resolver/jars/xml-resolver-1.1.jar
           => `resolver-latest.jar'
Connecting to xml.apache.org:80... connected!
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 51,861 [application/octet-stream]
 
    0K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 98%]
   50K ->                                                        [100%]
 
09:56:24 (89.16 KB/s) - `resolver-latest.jar' saved [51861/51861]
 
bash-2.03# 

Additional information related to installing the xml-commons-resolver package can be found in the Third Party Software chapter.

The docbook-xsl package does not need to be installed on your local system as long as Internet access is available. However, having a local copy of the docbook-xsl package installed can speed up the processing of DocBook.org files.

You can typically tell if your system has the docbook-xsl package installed, using the following command:

[pkb@salsa pkb]$ ls /usr/share/sgml/docbook
docbook-xsl-1.64.1       sgml-dtd-3.1-1.0-17  xmlcatalog
dsssl-stylesheets        sgml-dtd-4.0-1.0-17  xml-dtd-4.1.2-1.0-17
dsssl-stylesheets-1.76   sgml-dtd-4.1-1.0-17  xml-dtd-4.2-1.0-17
gnome-customization-0.1  sgml-dtd-4.2-1.0-17  xsl-stylesheets
sgml-dtd-3.0-1.0-17      utils-0.6.12         yelp
[pkb@salsa pkb]$ 

If you don't see output similar to the above, it indicates that the docbook-xsl package is not installed on your system. Or, that it is installed in a different directory than we were expecting.

If you system has the docbook-xsl package installed in a different directory, you will either need to add a symbolic link, or set the XML_COMMON_DOCBOOK environment variable to the directory it can be found at.

If your system doesn't have docbook-xsl package installed and you'd like to install a local copy, additional information on installing docbook-xsl can be found in the Third Party Software chapter.