My final question

rossi46 · 01-18-2006, 06:58 PM

Honestly, I wont ask any more questions on these boards if someone will please just speak to me like a two year old, take me by the hand and show me step by step what I'm doing wrong.

What I want to do is install the game vdrift 2005. Currently, the tarball is on my desktop and Ive tried EVERYTHING to make it work - unsuccessfully. My distro is Mandriva and I'm running the KDE desktop.

The actual location and filename of said tarball is: /home/rossi46/vdrift-2005-11-03-bin.tar.bz2

I've been trying for 2 weeks now to install this game without success. Do I open a terminal first? or do I have to do the CTRL/ALT/F1 thing first? Do I have to be logged on as root? I guess you're thinking 'If you're struggling here, then boy are you gonna be stuck when you try some complicated stuff later on!' and you'd be right...

Thanks

Paul

bigjohn · 01-18-2006, 07:16 PM

I don't recall what the complete tar command would be for a bz2 file - it'd be something like tar -xvjf /home/rossi46/vdrift-2005-11-03-bin.tar.bz2 which would unpack it probably just into your /home directory/partition. Yes to do that you have to open a terminal, yes you have to be root (normally).

What you could try, is look into your system, there should normally be an app under packaging (I think) called "ark". you should be able to open it, point it at the file in the /home, highlight and then click to unpack - erm, somewhere in there I believe you will be asked for the root password.

Oh and there is a link in my sig for "decyphering" man pages, so read the link, open a terminal and do "man tar" then you should be able to decypher what the -xzvf or whatever the arguements needed for a bz2 file are.

sorry I can't be more specific - I don't "do" packages like that - I've had too many disasters!

regards

John

IBall · 01-18-2006, 07:16 PM

1) Open a terminal. It should be in your menu somewhere.
2) Enter the command:

Code:

tar -xjvf vdrift-2005-11-03-bin.tar.bz2

3) Change to the directory created and type "./configure"
4) Run "make"
5) su to root, and run "make install".

If you get any errors, then post them here and we will try to help.

--Ian

Poetics · 01-18-2006, 07:23 PM

Let's se if I can help you with this.

I'm big on the command-line, but remember there are -many- different ways of doing this.

Open up a terminal (or do the Alt-Ctl-F1 thing if you wish)
Change to the directory ('cd /home/rossi46/')
Unzip the file ('tar xvjf vdrift-2005-11-03.bin.tar.bz2')

Now, I don't know off the top of my head what is inside the zip, but it sounds like a binary file instead of source. Type 'ls' to see what's around.

If there is a vdrift-2005-11-03.bin (or similar), make sure you're still in the right directory ('pwd'). If you type 'ls -l' you can see the permissions on the file. Make sure the .bin file has something similar to 'rwxr-xr-x'. The important thing is the X's. If it has the execute flag (as we just checked), you can run it by typing the following: './vdrift-2005-11-03.bin' Now remember, if the filename is different, type in whatever filename you see.

If it doesn't extract a file but instead a directory, make sure to 'cd' to that directory before trying the above. If the X's aren't there, type the following while in the directory with the file: 'chmod 755 vdrift-2005-11-03.bin' -- this makes the file executable.

If these directions aren't what you need, please reply with what you see with an 'ls' after running the 'tar xvjf' command.

Poetics · 01-18-2006, 07:25 PM

What IBall described is called 'installing from source' and may be what you need to do if you see things like 'Makefile' and the like inside the unpacked directory (if it unzipped a directory instead of a single file)

haertig · 01-18-2006, 07:30 PM

Quote:

"My final question"

Isn't that kind of like "My final trip to the hardware store"? Yeah, right!

The step-by-step from IBall looks right on (although I've never tried to install this specific tarball). One way to easily capture output from the commands that were listed, so you can easily post that here if needed, is:

Code:

./configure 2>&1 | tee configure.out
make 2>&1 | tee make.out
make install 2>&1 | tee make-install.out

You'll then have three files: configure.out, make.out, and make-install.out that you can post. Hopefully everything will work for you the first time, but be mentally prepared for a failure on the make command because you might be missing one or more dependencies. BTW, if the first "make" fails, there's no reason to go on to "make install". Gotta fix the "make" first.