Hi all,

I am using Fedora for quite some times. But I always stuck to the basics. Now I want to experiment little bit. I want to be able to install soft wares from source those aren't available as RPM file.

My question is, what are the minimum packages which need to be installed to enable source compilation? I have Fedora 9 DVD.

I also know 'make' is one of them. But don't know all needed packages.
Can anybody list the bare minimum packages I need to install?

I'm not quite sure of Fedora rpm packages, but typically you'll want a compiler collection (GCC; to work you'll need a compiler and a linker, or perhaps many), make utility, development libraries for the stuff you need and so on. Some distrubutions provide a meta package that itself doesn't "install" anything (not files anyway), but instead depends on the "needed tools" and when installed, draws in the rest of the herd. See if there's a package available that is called "build-essentials" or something that sounds similar.

When you compile a project, if it comes with a configure script (that you run as the first step in the compilation process), you can run that - it should fail if you don't have the needed tools. Then check the error message and maybe do a web search for it if you don't get what it means, and you should find out what you're missing. The minimal "compilation tools" aren't always enough, sometimes you need extra libraries and such, and that's what the configuration script checks for -- so pay attention to it's output (even when it succeeds; it might disable some functionality in the program if some pieces are not found, even if compilation of a functional program is possible).

Yes, I've heard about build-essentials. but it is for Debian and derived OS only.
I don't know about fedora.

yum groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries"

should get you the "basic" packages you asked for. There are more that are available, depending on what you intend to do:
yum groupinstall "GNOME Software Development" "X Software Development" "Java Development" "Legacy Software Development" "KDE Software Development" "Fedora Packager" "XFCE Software Development" "Web Development"

In addition, whatever applications/packages/source code you want to compile may have additional prerequisites.

V

Thanks a lot. This is what I wanted.

Also be away that when a compile has a dependency you will need the -devel version of that dependency (in most cases) and not just the running version.

Thanks for the tips. Sorry for late acknowledgment.