Hi all,

If root is not to be used for ANY software installs, then really what account is on slackware? Wheel?

For example, I wanted to install KMymoney tonight from source. Which first of all I am NOT happy at all with sourceforge...there are no md5 checksums on so many of the files that they host. I truly belive that should be a minimum.

That said I ran viruscan on it...but who knows really.

Now I can do "configure" and "make" on the kmymoney source, but when I run "make install" i get errors. Then switch up to root and boom it works. Nice looking program I might add.

Now From the install help file it says:

So I tried "configure --prefix=home/myname/kmymoney"

But console gave me errors for inputting that wrongly.

Many others don't...they simply offer make and make install...which in my mind means you have to be root.

Now I know I can get files off of linuxpackages.net...but those guys compiled from md5 checksum-less files too, let alone the package build quality. Many of the packages there require gnome which I dont like. I'm 6 for 20 so far in being able to use/run any app's from linuxpackages that's why I'm doing them from source...which so far to date work like a charm almost allways...if "root".

What do you guys do?

virtually all tarballs have a configure script offering a --prefix. this is a very standard feature that comes from the default framework, so is not app specific. the general recommendation is to do what you did above, make as a normal user and make install as root. you can always allow your user to do a "sudo make install" via /etc/sudoers so you don't actaully become root, but the end result is the same.

ok thank you very much I appreciate your help.

Maybe it's a typo, but there should be a leading / before home.

Also, have a look at checkinstall, it builds tgz packages which you can then install properly. This is preferable to 'make install', since it is then under package management (you can remove it with removepkg etc).

If you want to install under your ~ directory (which I do for some things too), then also have a look at stow. This is a perl script for installing/deleting programs. It creates a symlink farm in a shared directory, which points back to each packages files. This much easier than installing each program to it's own directory (saves you having to link the bin/man/info/etc directories yourself).

There is (or should be) a link on each package page where you can verify the md5sum.

I downloaded and installed from the checkinstall homepage "checkinstall-1.6.0-i386-1.tgz" under slackware 10.2

I then tried to checkinstall my installation of the HP software...it got close to the end and then aborted.

However, I went and typed make install and the HP software installed.

Is it better to put checkinstall in from source?

Did you checkinstall as root? (sudo may not work)

yes. i think i'm going to try out the source beta and give that a shot.

checkinstall is just a shell script (though it includes the installwatch C library), so the package shouldn't be any different from installing from source. However, there have been a few bugs and I've experienced similar problems with an older beta version. Occasionally though, you might find a package that just doesn't want to work. In that case, you can always override the prefix during make install to put it in a tmp directory and then use makepkg. That's what I usually do when checkinstall flakes out.

It's best to get the checkinstall slackware package from slackware.com, http://slackware.it/en/pb/browse.php...a/checkinstall and install it with installpkg as root. See man installpkg.

I see you did that already.

Yea I put it in from there too, even installed from source.

I've had no luck with it at all. It makes the packages...but doesnt do it correctly.

I tried HP printing software, berkley database and no luck.

As root doing 'make install' works fine for these packages that fail, I dont get it.

If you use checkinstall, the only difference is you type checkinstall instead of make install. You need to be root to install normally. Which hp printing software did you install?

I dont have the link handy, but I went to the homepage for the project as sourceforge as I was re-directed there from Hewlet Packard. I believe it was HPLIP. It was the latest stable version. It works well so long as I do make install as root. Yeah when I run checkinstall I get the wizard for it to creat a package. Some programs it completes successfully, the package creation that is, but the packages really are not put together right or just dont work install. I'm using packagetool as root to install the packages I made with checkinstall. Very strange.

How many versions of checkinstall have you got on your system?

OK, I just tried to use checkinstall to build an mplayer package and it failed (it created the package but it was empty except for a few directories). Then I tried it with joe, same thing.

I think there must be somthing wrong with it (version 1.6.0).

However, you can easily create packages with makepkg.