I have been trying to install/compile a few programs, and have been fairly unsuccesful. I keep running across the instruction to "% make", and I don't know what that means. What is it, and how do I do it?

First of all, do you have to be doing the ./configure, make, make install, or is this something that can be installed via Synaptic, YaST, Yum, or RPM?

What are you trying to install and what distribution are you using?

Edited: Goodness, I should have expected that. Nevermind! Sorry for taking up space.

You should be able to download this using yum, however here is the way to install from the command line.

1. bring up a terminal
2. cd into the folder where you extracted qtparted
3. type - ./configure
4. type - make
5. type - su
6. type in root password
7. type - make install

Steps 3 & 4 can be combined like this

./configure && make

However I usually do them separately in case there is a problem.

Arg, I tried ./configure and at the end it said error: reiserfsprogs library (libreiserfs) not found. So when I try to use make, it says there is no makefile. What do I do?

Rhadryn try looking through this thread - and the referenced discussion.
Will give you some background.

My point wasn't to scare you away--quite the opposite. You're installing software the hard way. Synaptic, for example, is an installer program where you can search for software, double-click it, hit "Apply" and the software will be downloaded, installed, and so will all the dependencies.

A lot of people think you have to use a .tar.gz to install a program. You don't. That was my point.

Take a look at these screenshots and tell me this isn't easier than doing ./configure and all that.

I asked what distro you're using because Synaptic isn't on every distro. SuSE uses something called YaST instead. I'm trying to help you!

I believe that means you need the reiserfsprogs library before qtparted will configure so at this point make and make install will not work until the configure problem is rectified.

Your best bet however is to use yum to install qtparted which will also install any dependencies necessary.

We still don't know what distro you're using or what programs you're trying to install.
Knowing those things will help us make it easier for you to install them.

So sorry, I said them in my second post but I edited that because I thought I fixed the problem. I'm using Fedora Core 4, I am trying to install qtparted, and I don't know anything about YUM.

Yum is the package manager that comes with Fedora. I don't know if it has a gui frontend, but the command line syntax to install a program (for instance qtparted) would be:

yum install qtparted

you can get more info here:

http://www.fedorafaq.org/

and the Fedora documentation on your system, as well as the man pages.

type the following on the command line.

man yum
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I wish all the best.

Hopefully this will help. If Yum is anything like Synaptic or YaST, you should have a lot easier of a time installing QTParted than installing from source (which is the whole ./configure, make, make install thing).

http://www.fedorafaq.org/#installsoftware

That worked beautifully for two of the programs, qtparted included (Though now I don't know how to get to the program =O). However, I also downloaded XMMS, and for some reason it never would work on that. I tried the source RPM, but an error message kept popping up that said it cannot be installed with system-config-packages. So basically I'm happy, but I would like to figure out how to get XMMS to work.

You can also youse "smart" => a graphical program like apt or yum.
For installing this go to google and type 'smart RPM'.
Select RPM Search than select the package of your dist.

Ihope it will help you.

Open a terminal and type "qtparted" without the quotes.