[SGVLUG] Possible Presentation Topic

[David Lawyer]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 12:48:42PM -0700, A. J. Stasney wrote:
> Greetings... As a valuable companion presentation to "Command Line
> Tips..." consider a talk some time this winter on software
> installation, emphasizing command-line downloading, unarchiving,
> uncompressing, and if required compiling.  Management of RPM's
> (these appear to be the same as .mdk files for legacy Mandrake
> users) is a related issue.  This is something that would be of great
> value to me, but perhaps if there's general interest it would
> qualify as a good presentation topic.

There's also the .deb files for Debian and friends.  In fact, about
half of the major distributions now use .deb, but the supposed leaders
(Redhat and Fedora) use .rpm so I suppose .rpm's are still the most
popular.

> I've done reasonably well at self-instruction on the command line in
> general, but despite two years of frustrating effort, reading
> endless and ultimately useless books, guides, manuals, etc.  I have
> NEVER succeeded in getting any  .tar.gz or similar file, whether
> binary or source code, installed and working.

What?  I just use Debian's apt-get and everything gets done for me.
But in past years I've downloaded various stuff and it all worked.
Before the Internet, I used to keep Minix (a weak Linux) up to date by
downloading diffs (the difference between the source version on my PC
and the latest version).  There were scripts people wrote to run the
diffs, compile and install and they almost always worked, although
there might be some debugging required if I modified the scripts.
Then, there wasn't any such thing as distributions, but it all was
fairly easy because the programs were small.  So then I was doing it
the easiest way, or rather, there wasn't any easy way.

When you get a tar file, you just untar it in whatever directory you
use for that purpose (probably not your home directory).  Then look
for a README file or READMEFIRST file or INSTALL file or the like.
Read them.  You might also want to look at the "makefile" which should
manage the compiling and installing.  Just typing "make all" at the
command like might work if "all", as defined in the makefile, does
everything you want.  There may be options as to where the newly
created binaries and the manpages are put.  If you have a distribution
and just download some programs that aren't available in the
distribution, you might put the non-distribution binaries in
/usr/local/bin, (or usr/local/sbin).   "make all" at the command
like might work if "all", as defined in the makefile does everything
you want.  There may be options as to where the newly created binaries
and the manpages are put.  A good makefile should let you remove the
package also when you no longer need it.

Since I haven't done much of this in a long time, what I said above
could be wrong, and it likely needs improvement.
 
			David Lawyer