I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 and have never installed anything from source as it always goes wrong, always! I've recently install clamav from source because its newer than the one in the synaptic package manager, I have some questions.

If I install for source will/should the program show up in Synaptic? As it doesn't at present.

How do you uninstall something you've installed from source? Or is it different for each package?

Any help is appreciated.

Yes. it is different for each package. I was told to trace back what get copied during the "make install" and manaully delete them.

A better way is to create your own rpm from the src, and install it from rpm. This way you can uninstall it easily. Creating an rpm seems to be simple, but I still don't know how to create one.

Nope; Synaptic is your "package software manager;" if you install from source, it will not know that you did.
Usually, not always though, you can make uninstall.

Thanks guys, just one more question.

Is it better to install from source? As in because its configured to the computer better than .deb's and installing from synaptic?

I'll add that you can get source installs to show up in synaptic, though i don't know how useful it is, i.e. I don't know if synaptic will know that you've upgraded package X to version Y or if it will just see two things called package X. I believe the latter to be true.

IIRC, dpkg gets involved, though I don't remember the syntax. I bet google can help you out if you really want to do this, but again, I don't know why you would.

edit: As a matter of fact, now that I think of it, the kernel that shipped with Ubuntu 6.1 had a bug in nfs. For this reason, I had to install a new kernel from source & did so in such a way that it went into synaptic. Even then, the update manager continuously tried to "upgrade" my kernel to an older version (one that was newest in the repo, but not newer than the one I had installed). So, there's really no reason to install from source in such a way that it shows up in synaptic other than for searching.

In this day and age, it makes such little difference that the pain of not having the software being controlled by the package manager outweighs the tiny bit of performance gain you may or may not get by compiling for your specific machine.

The only other advantage I see to compiling from source is more control over the compilation itself - i.e. where it installs, what libs to use, etc.

Summary: ALWAYS use the package manger unless you have a *really* good reason not to.

Thanks again Brian, I'm really doing it for a learning experience and to loose some of the fear of the command line but this:

went straight over my head so I fear I have a lot lot more to learn! I really just wanted to find out if it should have shown up in synaptic because it didn't and I wondered if this was something I'd done wrong. Just got to figure out why freshclam wont update now (I'm assuming a dependency somewhere).