Installation problems
 

Hi all,

I am installing coin3d software (analog of Open Inventor) and I have troubles doing that. I did everything according to the manual:
1. I Put *.tar.gz file into /usr/local/src/ directory and gzipped it:
gzip -cd coin.tar.gz | tar xvf -

A directory named coin was created. Then I created a build directory coin-build and run configure from there:
cd coin-build
../coin/configure

then in directory coin-build I typed:

make
make install

Everything seem to go fine and the program seemed to be installed however I cannot use it. Is it possible to see whether it was installed? I tried
rpm -qa | grep coin

but it does not show anything. Should it show the packages that were installed manually?

Am I doing something wrong? I am sorry for silly questions, I am very new to installing software under linux.

Regards.

Use the whereis <package name> command or the locate<package name> command.
If it only returns a name then it was not installed.

"I tried
rpm -qa | grep coin
but it does not show anything. "

The rpm data base is where rpm stores its information about the packages that you have installed. When you compile a program to install it no information is recorded in the rpm data base. So rpm queries will find no information about packages compiled from source. In order to see if you have an executable program called coin try:

which coin

If you want to record programs compiled from source in the rpm data base then use checkinstall. You use this command sequence to do the compile.

./configure
make
checkinstall

This results in a rpm package which you install using the rpm command. checkinstall may be available on your Red Hat distribution CD. If not you can download it from here:

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

---------------------------
Steve Stites

I tried both which and whereis:

which coin
/usr/bin/which: no coin in (/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin)

whereis coin
coin:

I guess it was not installed. Does anybody know what is wrong? The installation process did not give any errors and seemed to be successful. I am using RH 9.0 if it makes any difference.

You could read the Makefile that the configure script produced. Look for the 'install' target. It will contain a few copy commands, and you can check if the program and library files are indeed in the directories they were supposed to be copied to. Also check that your paths are OK.

One possibility is that the makefile didn't run the 'ldconfig' program. Try running /sbin/ldconfig as root and see if that fixes the problem.

While looking at the Makefile, you may find a target called 'check'. Some projects have this target to check if the compilation went OK.

After installing from source, I will sometimes use the find command to locate new files in the /usr hierarchy: find /usr -cmin -5
Often this will reveal the location of documentation installed with the package.

Be sure to carefully read the INSTALL and README files that are in the source directory. There may be caviats that you need to heed for a successful installation.