Hey Everyone!

I was wondering whether one of you Linux pro's out there could lend us a tip or two inregards to some basic Linux installations.

Ive reacently got myself RedHat Linux 9 (Shrike), and runs nice. I am having difficult in installing software. Ive downloaded 'AMSN' and all i see is lots of unexecutable files. Now im from a MS Windows and MS Windows only background, so compiling files from source seems rather different from the norm.

Getting back to the 'AMSN', i messed around, and it said something about tcl ?... for starters what is it, and second of all, what do i do with it? and how do i rectify the 'tcl' problem..

Ive also downloaded 'LimeWire'. Again having problems with it, as it now comes up with crap saying "VM console environment must be installed'.. now i downloaded the 14MB file from JAVA website, but now ive got this far i can't seem to get anything working from here.

To top it off, ive dug up a few 'APC Magazine' and looked at the 'toolkit' sowfatre on the cd. It contains 'Linux' programs. I've now looked at this and tried to fiddle, but nothing works. I instaled WIRE. some emulator that runs windows programs under LINUX. I followed the 'README' text document and done what it asked me to do. But then nothing comes up! afterwards... All i see when i open the files are source code!

So as you can see, im having a bit of a hickup with the linux machine, but im finding it interesting in essence. So if anyone could give us a hand to help me with the obvious ' Installation Problem' that would be mostly appreciated.

thanking you all in advance..

....... MURBZ

Welcome to LQ!

Tcl is a scripting language. Probably the software you download is partially written in it. You can install Tcl from Red Hat's install CDs (just look for the Tcl RPM and install it with "rpm -ivh" or do it through the GUI). With respect to the Java, what sort of file did you download -- if it's a .bin you need to 'chmod +x' it and then run it. If it's an RPM you can just use 'rpm -ivh' as above (RPM is a standard way of packaging programs for easy installation). If it's some other sort of file post what kind it is and someone should be ablew to help.

What exactly did you do to install WIRE? Linux doesn't automatically add programs to GUI menus or anything like that. Assuming you did the standard configure, make, make install the program binary will belocated in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin and you can just type WIRE (or whatever the executable is called) to start it up.

Hey Mate.. Thanx for the help with the TCL scritpting.. Just done what you asked me, works good.

But still problems with LimeWire!

Ive downloaded it, and it is ( 'LimeWireLinux.bin' ,6 MB in size)

At console ive just typed: "sh ./LimeWireLinux.bin'
and it says it's checking environment or something.
then it prompts

"Preparing to install...
Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...
Configuring the installer for this system's environment...
No Java virtual machine could be found from your PATH
environment variable. You must install a VM prior to
running this program."

what is this path business??

Lime Wire requires Java to work....take a look here. You should see an accept button, just sign your life away and follow the instructions, there pretty easy to follow.

Side note, if you are looking for a P2P, how about aMule . This one has all of the needed packages with it and very easy to follow instructions.

Cheers,
Eric.