At the barest minimum, two tarballs are needed:

• Berkeley Sleepycat DB
• OpenLDAP tarball

The Berkeley DB must be installed before OpenLDAP. OpenLDAP will not build without it.

"The OpenLDAP tarball is under 2 megabytes, which means even us dial-up lusers can download it without pain. As of this writing, the stable edition is openldap-stable-20030709.tgz. I like to park the tarball and unpack it in /usr/src/:

tar xfz openldap-stable-20030709.tgz

This creates the openldap-2.1.22 directory:

cd openldap-2.1.22

Here there be README, INSTALL, LICENSE, ANNOUNCEMENT, and COPYRIGHT documents. Take the time to read these, as they contain important information. To take quick a look at compile-time options, type:

./configure --help

This is interesting reading, with the defaults clearly marked and the options self-explanatory. For now let's just stick with the defaults. Do the magic three commands:

./configure
make depend
make

Lots of things happen after each one; relax and wait. When it's all done, run the handy built-in test script to verify all is well:

make test

If there are errors, I fear I must abandon you at this point, and refer you to OpenLDAP.org (See Resources). If all is well, the final step is to actually install the newly-created binaries and man pages. From the root of the OpenLDAP directory, run:

make install

And you're done. Pay attention to the output of make install; it contains a lot of useful information. Direct it to a file for leisurely perusal:

make install | tee openldap-install.txt

Next: Configuring slapd.conf »