i've heard there's a piece of software that can do this. anyone know it?

until i get to better grips with command lines, installing from source or tar files or whatever is too impractical and time consuming, i need the ease and speed of RPM for now.

it's certainly possible (all rpms are made from source packages). Take a look at maximum-rpm a book that can tesch you the basics. If you want to make rpms for Fedora then go to to the fedora developers page.

A very simple way of creating rpm's from source tar's is checkinstall.

Do ./configure and make as usual but instead of make install run checkinstall. This will create an rpm (that probably runs on your system only )

http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/

thnx for the help guys. much appreciated.

was reading through the RPM-HOWTO i came across this line; "We assume here that you know how to build software from source. If you don't you probably shouldn't be starting with this document." and stopped reading. i've learned from other books theres little point in carrying on once you get this type of message as you'll only find yourself even more confused from unknown lingo, comands, unexplained processes etc. and time woulda been a wasted.

i'm still a and so have yet to get to grips with make, compile, yada yada.

there IS a piece of software out there that will do this for me until i get more read up and better practiced. i just can't remember the name of it.

(still getting through max rpm, finding it very easy to read, very informative, very helpfull, but still not what i'm looking for, so far)

checkinstall will build rpms for you but you do need a good understanding about how to install packages from source, so that you can enable configure flags etc that can make your rpm work not just on your system but on other peoples as well.

one day... i'll find it again.... a fully functioning piece of software that can fully manage all your source to rpm gubbins, with a front end pretty gui.

why can't all gui front ends provide all info on what commands you've just executed in command form read out even when you're clicking a mouse or running software. it would ease the learning curve to ensure that more software users become software developers, just through their normal use.

I wish someone could make me an RPM so I can have a volume control in KDE

u dont have KMix? there's meelions of volume controls that come with suse9.2, as i asumed there would be with most distros these days. how come you don't have a volume control in KDE?

Typically building from source is not that hard. Say you downloaded foo.tar.gz. Then

tar zxf foo.tar.gz
cd foo
./configure
make
sudo make install

There are other ways to do it, and some packages may need manual configuring. But usually the above is enough. And often it has gotten me around the dependency nightmares of RPM.