Re: How to do this...

[Anand Kumria <wildfire@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 23, 2000 at 11:53:32PM +0530, Bhummanjot S. Talwar wrote:
> Well this is a simple question for you guys, but I've never done or heard
> about this, so it's new and awesome to me.
> 
> I've d/l a no. of tar ball distros. of various s/w but I'm facing difficulty
> in installing them. The Kpackage does not install them then how to go about
> with installing them. Do I need to do some compiling or what ? I treid to
> read thru the READMEs distributed with them, but they talk Latin for me. The
> distros. that I've are different, I guess. A few say, "arch" , "nonarch" ,
> "src" , "binary".

Typically you need to look inside a tar.gz (also known as a tarball)
try: 

$ tar ztvf <filename>

If you decide you want to extract the files contained within, try:

$ tar zxvf <filename>

If the tarball is source code then the two files you'll need to read
are README and INSTALL. Obviously read README first as they will give
you some idea of what the software is indeed to do. INSTALL will tell
you how to compile it (or how to install it if it is binary already).

If you are still having problems then cut and paste the lines from
the README & co. which are not clear to you.

> With the RPM files I did not find any difficulty, as I installed them
> directly using kpackage. By the way do the RPMs also need to be compiled
> before installation.

RPMs as you might be aware are available compiled for a number of
architectures (i386, sparc, alpha, source). The source architecture
RPM (or source RPM) needs to be recompiled. rpm --rebuild <filename>
is how it is normally done but check rpm(1).

> One of the RPMs that I had installed included FreeAmp. It was an RPM distro.
> from the PCQuest CD. The problem is that it says it shud be compiled before
> installation becoz the Plugins that were a part of the distro need to built.
> Aren't RPM's precompiled ??

I'm not what you are referring to when you say "disto." in this paragraph.
Do you mean you Linux distribution? Or the fact that the RPM was distributed
to you.

Regards,
Anand

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