I am having issues understanding this install process


I have FC1, and it uses RPM as it's means of install, and others use *tar.gz, bz2 etc. I just found out that a .bin file is a self extracting file also.

Here is my problem. I don't understand the genre of installs. Can anyone explain in newbie terms why or where I should be reading to understand these minor things everyone seems to know already.


Lost Newbie(MST700)

ok so here it goes (sorta)
there are three ways essentially that you will need to install packages. lets cover rpm's first.
so you download this rpm and now you want to install it. it should be pretty easy. login as root, and run rpm -i *.rpm where * is the name of the package. there are a thousand and one errors that may come up though. and in which case refer back to linux questions. <because my typing skills are not that fast.
next the .bin package. this is a package that is a program, it should go log in as root and then run the package by changing to the directory and ./*.bin. then there is source files. this is where it gets tricky. you mentioned *.tar.gz . these are files locked in two compress formats. the way I uncompress is login in as root and then cd to dir then gunzip *.tar.gz then tar -xvf *.tar this will give a dir with the uncompressed files in them. now comes the fun part. you must now determine if it is a ready to use program in which case it must be started or a source. if it is a source run ./configure then make dep then make install.

now once this program is installed you must edit your path variable to find the binary executable. this is easy choose your favoraite text editor, I like pico, then edit ~/.bash_profile once there locate the line that says PATH=/bin:/sbin: etc etc. .. . . then at the end of that line add :/path_to_your_new_program/

and then you are ready. hopefully. . . the saga contenues

ps. just found a better article on source compulation here http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ticle&artid=15
go check it out