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Content: This will be the last podcast in our linux series installing software on linux can be quite hard it is generally the hardest part for windows users to get used to over the years it has gotten much easier we are going to go from hard to easy to start we are going to compile this is the way software has been installed on linux for quite a while first we are going to need to download the source code the source code is generally in what is called a "tarball" these tarballs usually have a .tar.gz ending the .tar section stands for Tape ARchive it was from back in the days of tape backup tar will bring a folder structure together into one file the .gz part is GunZipped tar might bring everything to together, but it doesn't compress anything so the .gz part compresses the .tar part to make a compressed file this made a ton of sense when on dial-up but it has now just become common practice so we need to find the source code tarball you can do this one of two ways you can either go the projects main site or you can do it how I do it and go to freshmeat.net freshmeat is a search engine for linux projects and on the project pages they have links to the source code as well as any other distribution methods today we are going to use gaim as our example application so head over to the gaim project page Now we are going to download it through a command line utility the command line utitlity is called wget wget is a command line internet tool used to download files. so you are going to need to get the url location of the tarball this is pretty easy to do, you just have to go through one of sourceforge's mirrors now the syntax for wget is wget url so just type in wget and then the url of the tarball now this will download the file to your current working directory I usually try to download source code and other temporary things in my /tmp directory that way it is all in one place so now it will take a little time to download and you have this tarball we need to extract the contents of this initially you needed to use two different processes to extract tarball gunzip would decompress the file, and then tar would actually extract it since tarballs are so popular tar has the gunzip part built in to extract an archive you are going to type tar xvzf tarball replace tarball with the name of the .tar.gz file you will see a long list of things these are the files being extracted from the tarball now you should have a folder in the directory called what the tarball was called without the .tar.gz now you have the source code extracted this is where it gets fun so lets cd into that directory most source code comes with a configure script this does a lot of work for you so lets assume that the configure script is there if it isn't you will have to read through a lot of documentation to configure the make so to run this configure script type ./configure now a lot of things will happen it checks many different things the most important is it checks for gcc gcc is the c compiler that is very popular almost all of the distributions either have gcc already installed or a gcc package make sure that you have gcc installed when you do this configure script it might come up with an error most of the time the errors from the configure script is a missing library libraries are little pre done code samples that programmers use to get those libraries you want to look through your package manager if the library isn't in there, then you might have to download them and compile them google will tell you your answers so once you get a successful configure it will say that it is making some files now you will notice that you have a new makefile in the directory so now we need to do a make command this make command will do the actual compiling this will probably take the longest time to do simply just type make all kinds of these will go across your screen when that is done everything is compiled now that everything is compiled, you need to put it in the correct place you don't need to do this manually to move all of the correct files just type make install this will move everything now everything is installed look through the documentation for the location of the executable now you can remove the tarball and that source code folder you know have that program installed from source one of the biggest downfalls of compiling is trying to uninstall there is no real good way to uninstall compiled applications the only way to do it is to do a search for the application and then remove all of the files you find the next way to install software is through a package manager these days there are two main package managers there is the Red Hat Package Manager and the Debian package manager Red Hat Package Mangers are rpms and Debian packages are deb files first we are going to look at rpms, then debs operating systems such as fedora and suse use rpms for package management they use there own tools they still generally use the rpm program for command line tools that install a single package there are two different ways to use the package mangers one is to use a software such as yum for fedora this will go out and look at a repository that someone maintains and then resolve any dependencies then there is just single file install which is just using the rpm command first download the rpm file then you can install the file with a rpm -i file command this will install, you can use the -u command if it is updating now that will look for all of the dependencies it needs if you don't have one it will alert you and it won't install now the better way to do this is to use a tool like yum yum is for fedora, yast is for suse they generally have the same syntax yum doesn't require you to download anything up front you can use it by typing yum install app it will then look at a repository that is managed by someone it looks for the file and then if there are any dependencies that you don't have installed on your system, it will download those also the deb system also has both a package manager and then a command line tool to use the download command line tool download the .deb then install it with dpkg -i package that will install the file but not any dependencies now I find they have the best repository manager called apt-get apt-get works the same as yum just type apt-get install package this is the basics of installing

[ Tue, 12 Sep 2006 19:09:42 -0400 ]

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