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OK I have downloaded a couple of apps. They have extension xxxx.tar.gz.
I went to the terminal and if I type ./configure --prefix=/usr (as in the case of SuperKaramba), I get the message "no such file or directory (I am by the way in [my_name@localhost my_name]
Did you unpack and untar the files first? A .tar archive (called a tarball) is a collection of files. Most tarballs, like this one, are compressed to make the filesize smaller. A popular compressionformat is GZip (.gz). Hence the extension .tar.gz.
To use the files you must unzip and untar them. You can do both at once with the following command:
# tar -xvfz archivenamehere.tar.gz (don't write the #)
Probably this creates a new directory 'archivenamehere' which contains your files.
Change to that directory:
# cd archivenamehere
After you've read 'INSTALL', 'README' etc. you can start installing you're program:
# ./configure (use ./configure --help to see the available options for configuring the program)
# make
# make install.
Thanks Maarten, OK it is still not working, I am probably doing something wrong.
First do I use the terminal or the command line (Alt + F2) to run the script? (I like to know the difference between these two if there is one, but maybe later)
When you say "archivenamehere.tar.gz", do I actually type archive + the name of the file (I have tried both BTW).
Originally posted by j_carmona Thanks Maarten, OK it is still not working, I am probably doing something wrong.
First do I use the terminal or the command line (Alt + F2) to run the script? (I like to know the difference between these two if there is one, but maybe later)
When you say "archivenamehere.tar.gz", do I actually type archive + the name of the file (I have tried both BTW).
Thanks
JC
Lets say you have a package calleed package-1.0.tar.gz. You download it and store it in a directory called download in your /home directory. To install it you would
Start a console (termainal emulator)
Change to the directory you downloaded the file e.g.
$cd downloads
extract the file e.g.
$tar -zxvf package-1.0.tar.gz
a direcory called package-1.0 will be extracted from package-1.0.tar.gz
change into package-1.0 e.g.
$cd package-1.0
do the following
$./configure
$make
$su -c "make install"
Always read the installation instructions because they don't always conform to the standard. for KDE packages don't use a prefix, the configure script searches for the right one, but on mandrake you may have to do "./configure --prefix=`kde-config --prefix`"
Thanks reddazz, that worked!! I don't know but in the first post Maarteen gave me the command "-xvfz" a typo maybe?? Or is this a different one from your one?
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