Thanks a lot! Really! That cleared up everthing. Thanks again!

PS - What is 'lol'? I'm sorry, I'm quite new to being online... I just had a connection.

Laugh Out Loud. The net's full of those - afaik, rotfl, and so on. And, of course, RTFM. *g* (The *g* means 'grin', btw - which means 'by the way'.)

The net's great. Have fun.

I normally extract them to ~/Source - no need to go out of your home directory.

LOL = laugh out loud
AFAIK = as far as I know
IIRC = if i recall correctly
RTFM = read the (cough)flipping manual
ROTFL = rolls on the floor laughing.

ohhhh so that's what RTFM meant..heheh

check out a prog called checkinstall. When u are installing from a source, checkinstall makes a package with all the file that were compiled. So that you can distribute the file in a simple package format later, or when u want to uninstall the prog for whatever reason, u can just use simple removepkg or rpm -e or whatever. As far as i know, checkinstall makes 3 different types of packages, one for tgz, rpm, and deb..
go to freshmeat.net and check it out

What if its on cd do you have to just write the file name or the whole description on where it is?

whats with confirgure,make,su,make install?? why cant you just write tar -xzvf "filename"?
or you have to write all the combinations in one sentence like this tar -xzvf "filename ./configure make su make install?

You would have to tell it where it is
tar -zxf /mnt/cdrom/file (if that is where you mount your cd's)

No, those are all separate commands. First you extact it, then you configure it, then you make (compile) it, then you install it.

tar (enter).....no news is good news

./configure (enter)....if it went through the configure with no errors then move on.....if you got errors then you have to see what they are about

make (enter) same as above witht the errors

su (enter) this changes you to root so you can write to the directories where the files go

make install (enter) install the files

Yeah - sorry - I put them on separate lines meaning they're separate commands. Unless something's on the path (which is usually just bin-type directories) you're always going to have to put full pathnames.

So the command to untar/zip is:
tar -xzvf /mnt/cdrom/filename.tar.gz

If it's just an uncompressed tar, it's
tar -xvf blahblah
and so on for other archive and compression formats. (man tar for all that.)

And then you cd to the directory, such as /where you installed it/filename - you can cat the INSTALL and README and other doc files if you want (good idea, but not always necessary).

And then you configure it:
./configure

Then build it:
make

Then su to root, type in your password and install:
make install

As long as the libraries are found and the directory structure is good and the system is capable and so on, you've got a program. You can run programs - say you're doing joe - in between make and make install you can type ./joe, I think, and it should run. So you know everything's good. So then make install. The scripts will generally send it to /usr/local/bin along with man pages to /usr/local/man and so on. /usr/local/bin should already be on your path, so type in the app name and it runs.

But as far as just untarring - like say it's some of your personal files that aren't executable, yeah - 'tar -xzvf /mnt/cdrom/files' will untar them and you can 'fooeditor foofilename' or whatever you want to read/edit them. The rest of the stuff is just for compiling. Oh, and as far as your libraries, those'll probably go to /usr/local/lib as they aren't executables so much as for executables.

-- Oops. I was typing slow while you were editing - this is kind of a pointless post now. *g*

lol, thats what happened yesterday morning. I was editing along with chatting on aim and when i was done there were already 3 posts done.