very newbie q's
 

I'm new to linux so here goes my dumb q's

I have suse 9.1 up and running... now i want to install mysql, php and apache. i've downloaded mysql 4.1.8 as a tar.gz
I use gunzip to unzip..... but what next?

how do i open the readme file? is there a gui for that?

what commands in terminal do i use to install, and what file is used to install...

windows geek here looking for install.exe

thanks

next you ywould use tar to un-tar the resulting .tar file.

however, tar can automatically gunzip files.

tar -zxf file.tar.gz
or
tar -xjf file.tar.bz2

it seems you have downloaded source code, compiling programs yourself can be quite confuding to newbies, may i surgest installing using Yast, or a pre-compiled RPM . the packages will probably be on your suse install disks.

however if you do want to attempt to compile, the normal procedure is...

extract the source code
cd into the extracted source code
./configure
make
make install

if any step fails, resolv the problem (probably a missing dependency)
run make clean. then try again.

you can read the README file with any editor like the console-based ones (less , vi, emacs, joe...) or another one with gui (xemacs, nedit, glimmer...)

The easiest and most common tool is "less" (or more...)....--> less README

You could also make cat README...


in the README you will find all instructions for the installation(same like decribed above mostly)

Re: very newbie q's
 

Linux doesn't use extensions for executables :)

Basic question, why did you download that file? Does Suse not have those packages in it's repository to install with it's own package manager? I would think the answer would be yes, but no idea why you downloaded the files like that.

yast
 

Yast r cool indeed....

thanks qwijibow

i r a dumb newbie deeze....

i'm learnin, thanks

You might find this little page helpful - I found it this morning
http://www.faqs.org/contrib/yal/page7faq.htm#7