After software install
 

Hi, as of today I am running Mandrake 9.2. I have been running Fedora for a month or so but it was a bit buggy for me... I digress...

I don't want to make any mistakes as I begin to load my new OS with more programs so I had a question...

Assume that I download a program in a tarball format and am going to install it..
1) where should I extract to? I currently extract to /home/myname
2) after I run ./configure & Make & Make install, where can I go to find the program to launch usually? (example being realplayer)
3) Can I delete the folder that I extracted to or does it need to stay there now and forever amen?
4) If I make clean, do I need to leave the folder I installed from alone still or can I delete it?

Thanks in advance, this may seem like stupid questions but I just want everything to stay clean and uncluttered.


Thanks......
JB

1) I use ~/build/ for unpacking tarballs and building stuff from source. It works for me and I keep my downloads in another directory to keep things clean. Whatever you're the most comfortable with. :)

2) Most programs that you build from source will install to /usr/local/bin - the /usr/local tree is where you're supposed to keep locally built stuff but you don't *have* to. Although, it helps since most distribution-supplied software installs to /usr, so if you install your locally built stuff to /usr/local you will not over-write any distribution files.

3) You can delete the directory but I recommend keeping at least the directory itself and the Makefiles in it and its subdirectories. This way you can easily backtrack what files that program installed and often the Makefile supports doing a "make uninstall" to remove the installed software from your system.

4) See nr 3. :)



Håkan

Before you run the ´make install' command, you need to su to root. You probably just left that out, but I didn´t want to someone reading that to miss the point.

You could use the find command to locate where new files are located.
find / -cmin -4
will locate all files created in the last 4 minutes.
Or you could look in the make install section of the makefile. There will be copy commands you could examine.

thanks for the information

You might also want to look into checkinstall. When you compile a tarball, you use checkinstall instead of 'make install' and it will create an RPM (or Slackware or Debian package) for you and install it. That way you can easily remove / re-install it from the rpm. This is a great feature since 'make uninstall' doesn't always work as it should.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere

Thanks for the advice. I like the checkinstall program. Its like having custom RPM's for anything I want to install.