Ok so this is probably the most stupid question in the world, but I am having huge problems executing downloaded files in Fedora Core 2. My most recent disaster has been with Kile-and IDE for latex. i have downloaded two different versions of it, but they will not start with ./filename at the command line, can anybody tell me what i am doing wrong?

]thanks,

they might not be set as executable.

chmod +x file
./file

or

sh file

If you downloaded 'kile', it was probably either an rpm package or a tarballed source directory that you downloaded. What was the exact file name that you downloaded? With a .rpm file you need to install it with a package manager or the 'rpm' command. If it was a tarball you need to extract the directory, and follow the instructions in the README and INST-LL files.

For kile, that would be the instruction sequence of
tar xvzf kile-<version>.gz
cd kile-<version>.gz
./configure
make
su
******* # root password
make install

Read through the INSTALL and README file to make sure this sequence is correct.
A simpler program may just have a Makefile. I've run across some tarballs where there wasn't a 'configure' file buy there was a config.in file, and I needed to run the
command 'autoconf' to produce the 'configure' script.

A tarball installation will probably put the files in the /usr heirarchy. You can run the command 'find /usr -cmin -5' to find new files and directories produced in the last 5 minutes.
The executable will probably be copied into either /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. There will more often than not also be man files installed, and sometimes library files. For a program like kile, also icons files in /usr/share. But you may need to install the k-menu entry yourself.

On occasion, I've needed to run the 'ldconfig' command as root, so that the new library paths would be registered.

Another type of installation will run an automated install script. NVidia drivers and the Firefox browser may use this type of installation method.

Hi there,

thanks for your reply. It's an rpm that i have downloaded, kile-1.6.3-0.fdr.1.2.src.rpm. Can you tell me what this "rmp command" is?

thanks,

the rpm command is.. rpm.
to install.

or
i = install
U = upgrade if it exists, install otherwise
v = verbose output to console
h = hash thingies (####) to show progress of installation

The file you downloaded is a source rpm. You might want to download an .RPM for your distro that doesn't have the .src. in the name.