so, i make music, i play games, i talk to people in my guild on irc, i download things.
i'm a nerd and it's only natural that linux would come my way. i've made attempts on using this wonderfull OS in the past. but things like redhat's omitting of mp3 codec\me knowing nothing about linux, other than basic unix navigation commands.. kept me stuck in windows

i've browsed these boards for a bit of time, and figured it's time. i am going to learn.

so here's what i'm trying to accomplish, i know it's a lot for one post.. but the community here seems nothing short of amazing. and rightfully so!!

I am currently running suse 9.1 personal, might switch over to pro eventually, or a diff distro all together.

Please keep in mind, that i greatly appreciate any help you can offer. i am new to most of the happenings of linux, and need step by step instructions. and i'm probably going to reply back, heh. teaching, is learning.

1
what i am trying to do in order of importance,
run irc - i have bitchx as of now, at least the file.
i really dont care what client it is, so if you cant suggest something that may work better.. feel some serious freedom.
logged in as SU, i run sh install.sh for this file in konsole
says i need automake.
so i downloaded automake 1.3, extracted it.
still logged in as SU, i run sh install-sh in konsole
and it says no input file selected.


2
ah yes, good old ut2k4, fun game.
fun.. when you can play it :P
so i read about this, and found comfort in the fact that i'm not the only one who cannot mount things or figure out how to install the game.
unfortunately i have the cd version.
what i have tried thus far on this one is, copying the install file to the desktop and running it through konsole. it asks for the second cd, which it doesnt seem to find..
tried it off the cd as well, same deal. wont read off the cd.

3
i've heard that a divx plugin is not needed, and that you can just install a media play which already supports this.
so i downloaded these two rpm's and attempted to run them in yast, and sh them.
mplayer-common-1.0pre4-i386.rpm
and
mplayer-gui-1.0pre4-3.i386.rpm
yast said no. also, i'm guessing you cant sh rpm's. arrg

alright, i think this is enough to hopefully get some usefull ideas\things to try.
thank you!
<3 ehafh

ps- if i have left out anything you need to know, please just ask.
also, feel free to message me online via aim at ehafh.
i'm logged into linux now may have to switch out a bit later.. but yeah. :P

3.
rpms are installed with command "rpm -i foo.rpm"

1. You do have irc clients precompiled and distributed by SuSE (eg. in your installation cd), probably even bitchx.
It is easier to use precompiled distritbution package(rpm, deb, whatever they are called in various distributions) if there is one available for your distribution/architecture.
Why?

• You don't have to compile the software by ourself, so the burden of configuration is smaller (In fact, the burden is larger, but it is done by package maintainers).
• When software is under package management, you can't accidentally overwrite other software when installing one.
• Some advanced PM systems (eg. deb) take care of updating configuration files and settings when doing updates.
• PM systems enable the possibility to automaticly track dependencies of software so all the depending parts can be installed automatically.
• Software can be removed from the system without hassle.

What comes to automake, it is a tool used by developers to generate package "compiling instructions", so called makefiles (well the whole story is more complicated: in fact automake is used to generate 'Makefile.in's from files 'Makefile.am', and these .in -files are made to corresponding makefiles, when package is configured (and the configuration tools are generated with autoconf...)). To make long story short, you don't need automake (or autoconf, autoheader, autogen, aclocal, autoreconf) unless you are developing software, compilation can be done without them.

Issue install-sh:
The name of install-sh is somewhat misleading; it is not used to install the program, but is just a part of the toolchain that is used when files are copied to correct places and set permissions to something reasonable. Just running it without arguments shouldn't work.

But what if we want to compile a package anyways?
Generic adequate instructions: read the file called INSTALL located in the source package.
Generic quick instructions: (If you look at the INSTALL file in bitchx, you see these apply to it too)
Three commands:
What does those commands do?
-First one examines your system; it checks what libraries and what versions of them are present, what processor you are having, what operating system you are running what compiler you are using and other similar things. After gathering this information it generates a Makefile (combining gathered information and contents of Makefile.in).
Makefiles are files that answer to questions like "What commands I have to run and what parameters I have to give to eg. C-compiler to compile these bitchx source files to get them working to this system using these libraries that are installed."
-The second command compiles the package. It uses that Makefile just generated and produces the binaries.
-The third command installs the files (generaly systemwide) to some location (to /usr/local by default; can be changed in ./configure -phase by using --prefix flag [changing that is not recommended if you are not certain that you know linux filesystem structure works]). This last command has to be run as root (why: Technically, it copies files to places where others don't have access. Semantically, it alters the environment of all users (by offering them a new program: bitchx).

Why those instructions can be said to be generic?
About 90% of the GNU software uses the GNU toolchain to manage the software project.
Why so? It has the advantage that the program get easily ported to plenty of architectures out there.

thanks for the quick response,
i'm still having trouble..

for mplayer, this is what i typed while trying to install the rpm

x1-6-00-0c-f1-db-a2-96:/home/ehafh/Desktop # rpm -i mplayer-common-1.0pre4-3.i38 6.rpm
warning: mplayer-common-1.0pre4-3.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 75aa 026a
error: Failed dependencies:
mplayer = 2:1.0pre4 is needed by mplayer-common-1.0pre4-3

for bitchx, i couldnt locate an irc client on here or in the install packages. plus i'd rather learn how to install myself..

x1-6-00-0c-f1-db-a2-96:/home/ehafh/Desktop/x/BitchX # ./configure make install
configure: WARNING: you should use --build, --host, --target
configure: WARNING: you should use --build, --host, --target
Welcome to the BitchX-1.1-final configuration

checking for make-gcc... no
checking for gcc... no
checking for make-cc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for make-cl... no
checking for cl... no
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH


any ideas anyone?

Those where three separate commands. not
, but as posted in my first reply.

Also, it seems that (if those errors where not because the command was somewhat weird) you don't have a c compiler installed. Install gcc from your distribution.