This document provides a more detailed explanation of the above procedure for Unix systems. If you're just scanning, please remember that this document is long because we're very specific and because we're trying to answer questions before you think of them, not because this process is hard or takes a long time. In most cases you can really just skim over this and end up with an installation that works just fine. Just look at the headers, if you understand what the header is saying then you really can just skip the entire section under it.

Before you install MailMan, make sure that you have Perl 5 installed. On most Unix systems, especially web hosting systems, Perl will already be installed. If Perl is not installed, or if Perl version 5 is not installed, consult your system administrator. You can do a really quick check for Perl by just typing "perl -v" at the command line. You should hopefully see a report as to exactly what version of Perl you have installed. On most systems you can also type "which perl" to find out exactly where Perl is installed, which you will need later.

First unpack the files

On most systems you can type "tar -zxpvf mailman_blahblah.tar.gz" and your system will expand the file into all of the MailMan components.

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Then copy the files to your web server
Copy the files that you just unpacked from the distribution into the location where you want your MailMan installation to live, "public_html/mailman/", for example.

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Then check your permissions

Make sure that your copy of the Mailman CGI script is executable.

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Check the top line of the script file
Make sure that the first line of the Mailman CGI file refers to the correct location of your Perl interpreter.

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Configure your web server to run MailMan as a CGI script
If MailMan doesn't run by now on its own then you many need to mess with your web server configuration to tell it to run MailMan as a CGI script.

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Set up a directory for MailMan to write files into
This step only applies for MailMan Professional Edition, if you are using the Standard Edition then you don't need to do this. The Professional Edition needs a directory where it can write files.

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If you have any problems with anything at all then just contact us for assistance. We're happy to help.