problem in installing ion dektop environment
 

SORRY,that was ion window manager.
I am using openSUSE 10.3 with GNOME dekstop environment.

First I installed lua & lua-devel(5.1.2) as given in readme file of ion.
README of ion says to edit system.mk to suit your system.What should I do?(I did nothing)
then make gives following error

make[1]: /usr/local/bin/lua: Command not found
make[1]: *** [exports.c] Error 127
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/lxuser/ion-3-20090110/mod_tiling'
make: *** [subdirs] Error 2

has anybody installed ion window manager from source tarball?

This:

Tells you your problem. The instructions tell you to edit that file, and you didn't, but you're surprised you have problems. Follow the instructions, edit the file(s) you need to.

My system has i686 architecture and shell is bash.What should I edit in that file.Has anybody installed ion successfully from tarball.

READ AND FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS. They're in the tarball, or on the website.

i did as given in documentation.

even when i am root in terminal still 'make' gave above error.
make[1]: execvp: /usr/local/bin/lua: Permission denied
make[1]: *** [exports.c] Error 127
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/lxuser/ion-3-20090110/mod_tiling'
make: *** [subdirs] Error 2

The problem is either line 66 or 65, LUA_DIR=/usr/local in the file system.mk. It's trying to find lua in the wrong directory. Change LUA_DIR=/usr/local to LUA_DIR=/usr and that will probably do it, depending on where lua was installed.

Note: I am just a beginner, and came across the directories /usr/local when I switched to Slackware and compiled a few programs from source. Some programs install to that directory instead of the usual /usr directory, which I prefer for testing a program. However, if you can, try to find a package for ion for your distro, else you might not be able to use it unless you edit some environment variables.

I got precompiled Lua libraries and executables and copied them to places mentioned in installation section.Then I edited system.mk.
Can you give me detailed explanation of which entry in system.mk about lua searches for folder containing what files.