RPM's

[Temlakos]

On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 23:47 +0100, Maciej R. wrote:
> Hello out there,
> 
> I wanted to download aMule but there are no RPM's for Fedora Core 3
> (anyway - do you know good P2P tools?). Would the Suse 9.2 or FC2 ones
> work on my FC3? What are the differences between RPM's for different
> distros? Wouldn't it be easier to download a kind of EXE file for all
> distros?
> 
> -- 
> Maciej R. <m.mail at vp.pl>
> 

I don't pretend to be an expert; I've used Fedora for about a year now,
and am on the third release. When I wanted to install an application
that did not yet have an FC3 build, I first tried to work with the FC2
build. It seg-faulted every time I tried to so much as load it. (It was
GRAMPS, the genealogy system, which right now doesn't have an FC3
build.) So I grabbed the tarball and ran the usual scripts (./configure
&& make && make install). And it worked, and continues to work.

RPM's are fine--*if* they are built for your specific kernel and desktop
environment or are at least within reasonable tolerances. If they
aren't, the applications seg-fault away every time you try to load them
or do anything significant with them. (Typically I get "signal 11,"
which is a general segmentation fault. That usually occurs when you try
to divide by zero, or--more likely--try to de-reference a pointer that
in fact is pointing to nowhere.)

The RPM repository keepers try their best to offer RPM's that will
install properly on your particular release. Three of them (Axel, Dag,
and Dries) are regular contributors to this list (and they might not be
the only ones). If *they* don't have an RPM in their most-stable repos
for any given application, then you probably are better off using the
tarball (typically named application.releasever.tar.gz) and building
your application directly from the supplied source code. Which is
something you're not allowed to do in Windows ("WinDoze"), and that's
another great feature of Linux.

In short: check to see whether the application you want is available as
a source-code archive, also known as a "tarball" (for TAR, the
traditional Unix archive format). Most "tarballs" are not only packaged
with TAR but are then re-packaged with GZIP--hence the double extension
".tar.gz". So if you find one of those, here is what you do:

1.	Download this to your home directory or to your desktop--anywhere
where you can get to it.

2.	Start a Terminal window--you'll want to work with the command line.

3.	Execute "su", for "Super User." When it asks for your root password,
give it. You have just become "root" for this session.

4.	Execute "tar -zxvf application.releasever.tar.gz" (Here replace
"application.releasever" with whatever comes before the ".tar.gz" in the
file's name.)

5.	That process will create a new directory having the name of the
application. Execute "cd application-releasever" or whatever.

6.	Execute "./configure". Hopefully this should proceed without error.
(If you get fatal configuration errors, you can't build this application
on your system for some reason, and it will *try* to tell you.) Assuming
the configuration step completes without fatal error:

7.	Execute "make". The configuration script has already set things up so
that "make" will follow some automatic scripts, called "makefiles," that
direct the compiler and linker as to where to find various source files
and libraries.

8.	Execute "make install". This will copy your finished application
program into the folder "/usr/local/bin". Thereafter, whenever you type
the application name, your application will start.

9.	Execute "cd /usr/local/bin" and then "ls" to read the name of your
new application. You will need to type that name in the "Run
Application" dialog to use the program.

10.	Execute "exit" twice. The first time will change you back to
yourself, and the second will end the Terminal session.

11.	After you've used the program for awhile, and you're sure you won't
need to remove it, you can log in as root long enough to remove the
directory you created with step 4 above. I'd advise keeping that
directory in place for one month. If you have to remove a program during
that time:

	A.	Start a Terminal window.
	B.	Execute "su".
	C.	Change to the directory you created in 4 above.
	D.	Execute "make uninstall".
	E.	Execute "make clean".
	F.	Now you can either try steps 5-10 again, or else scrub your system
of the tarball and the temporary directory.
-- 
Temlakos <temlakos at gmail.com>