Hello

Since I've been running Suse, I've been simply downloading packages in my home folder and gunzipping & tarring them there. Then within the folder created in my home, I would run my ./configure && make && make install.

Is this considered sloppy?
Should I install the packages in another location?
Should I have more options when ./configure, make & make install?

What methods should I practice?


Thanks.
Ciao http://images.linuxquestions.org/que...ilies/read.gif

For Suse, the most common way of installing packages is to use Yast, the package manager.

I always prefer to stick to packages for my distro rather than compiling from source, as it keeps everything consistent. For example, if you compile foo from source then it won't be seen by your distro's package manager. If you then try installing bar with your package manager, and bar depends on foo, then it won't know that foo is actually installed.

It is not "sloppy" to compile from source, you can get more optimised programs that way, but it is generally easier to use your distros package manager.

I hope this helps
--Ian

Yes.

Yes, typically /usr.

It is best to not use make install at all or to otherwise manually install software on your system, and to use a package manager instead. The reason is that you want to be able to cleanly remove whatever software you installed if you ever need to. In the case of your SuSE, I believe the package manager is Yast (but I'm not sure). In the case of my Mandrake 9.0, the package manager is RPM. If you run across software that simply isn't in the package format that your package manager supports, you want to build that software into a package for your package manager and you want to do that while running as a regular user (i.e. not as root). Then you can use your package manager to install and remove that software at will. Converting unpackaged software into packaged software doesn't look to be all that difficult but I have found documentation concerning the exact specifics on how to do it to be very lacking, so expect to be doing a lot of trial and error but consider the result to be well worth it.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.