Re: Black Holes.

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Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 18:36:50 +0100
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 02:29:19PM +0800, David Palmer. wrote:
> O.K., I'm trying to get on top of a few things here, and am struggling
> to find directions that make sense.
> It's got to the point where I have actually got to the point of starting
> off a series of posts at an open source forum to help out other newbies
> like myself.
> But even though I am able to find documentation that will teach me the
> basics of bash, I've looked all over the web for a simple tutorial to
> explain step by step procedure for download and install of a basic
> application.
> 'Start the installation procedure', was the last reference I copped,
> without the faintest thread of logical explanation about how one should
> go about doing that.
> I've downloaded the Gnupg application. I know it's there because after
> the end of the download the location is stated as
> '/home/username/.opera/download', so at a prompt I'll type:-
> 'cd /home/username/.opera/download'
> and I get echoed back to me:- ~/.opera/download$
> to check I type:- pwd
> and get :-/.opera/download
> echoed back again. So it's definitely there. But how do I get to it,
> install, and activate it?
> What is the procedure now?

As others have said, for a Debian app, learn about apt-get and
friends.

To build from source something which is not in Debian, the procedure
varies, but is generally along the lines of:

- download tarball, unpack it, cd into top-level directory of
resulting tree.
- Look for any README files and study them carefully. They are often
confusing, as they may assume the use of a particular Linux variant
without saying so, or may contain instructions for building under many
different OSes and you may not necessarily be able to skip all the
non-Linux bits without missing something important.
- Make any configuration file changes suggested by your study of the
READMEs. If you're lucky there'll be a ./configure script to do most
of this for you, though there may still be one or two things you need
to do by hand. You may also need to pass various parameters to the
configure script, for example to make sure it builds the application
for installation in /usr/local. Hopefully, the READMEs and/or
'./configure --help | less' will clue you in on this.
- Build the app - generally just 'make' unless the READMEs tell you
different. It helps to redirect the output from 'make' into a log file
in case it doesn't work.
- Install it - generally just 'make install' with comments as above,
plus you need to be root.

That's assuming it all works. If something goes wrong, it's more or
less impossible to make any useful comments on how to resolve it
without knowing the precise details of the particular case.

> So the only other avenue that I haven't tried is a book.
> On the Debian site there is a list. Would anybody who has read any of
> these be good enough to recommend one that attempts to communicate?
> DebianGNU/Linux Bible.

I think I've flipped through this. Out of date - based on potato - but
seemed pretty clear.

> Learning Debian GNU/Linux.

If this is the O'Reilly book with a picture of something like a Red
Indian riding a buffalo on the front, it's out of print. I got a copy
of it when I bought my slink CD and it was great then, but it would be
a bit out of date now. All the basics would still apply though.

ALL Linux books include LOTS of stuff about networking; if you're
not building a network it can be offputting to find that half the book
is about stuff you don't need. Don't be put off; you don't have a
choice :-), and you will probably need a fair bit of the networking
knowledge sooner or later - eg. to understand how your internet
connection works.

-- 
Pigeon
Be kind to pigeons
Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F

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• Previous message: Sidney Brooks: "Re: uhci"
• In reply to: David Palmer.: "Black Holes."
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