Puma is distributed as a tarball (created via 'tar cvz') and can be obtained via HTTP fro http://puma.sourceforge.net/.

Unpack the tarball (using 'tar xvzf {filename}') in a temporary directory. Usually the best place for this type of thing is in your own home directory or in the /usr/local/src/ directory.

Configuring puma is relatively easy. There are only a few parameters to configure, and the defaults are usually acceptable.

Go to the root directory of the unpacked tarball (possibly named puma-1.0.0?) and you will find configuration script called, "configure". Run the script in that director by typing './config.pl'.

The configuration script will first ask you where to place the configuration files. The default location is /etc/puma, but you can change this to /usr/local/etc/puma. You can change this to any value, but Puma ahs only been tested under those two configurations and may still have these two paths hard-coded into the source as of release 1.0.

The second question that will be asked is where to install the Puma modules. The default is /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl, but anywhere will do. You just have to remember to point Perl's library path to that location.

The configuration script will create the file 'config.xml' in the current directory. You can examine the contents of that file and make any changes beyond the questions asked in the script. If you run the configuration script again, it will give you the opportunity to use the config.xml file instead of the config.base.xml as a starting point, allowing you to keep any of your custom modifications.

The final step is to run './install.pl' This will copy all of the files to the appropriate location.

To install and configure Puma's sub-packages, click on the appropriate link on the left side of the page