On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 05:31:58PM +0100, Peter Hunter wrote:
Hi, me again,
I have been looking around the Linux.org site, and noticed that nearly all of there downloads are in the .gz format (I asume this is compressed a bit like .zip). Uncompressing proberbly won't be a problem, but how do I install the file/program from there? More to the point, where can I find instructions that will tell me what to do? (Bearing in mind of course that I am running Suse, which seems to be a bit different from other flavours of Linux).
Regards,
peter
With SuSE you have two choices 1 - preferred - use pre-built versions of the software you want (.rpm format) and install them using YaST
2 - not preferred (by many) - obtain the source code of the software and build it yourself. That's what you get with .gz or .tgz files. If you are lucky this may be a painless process but if not, you will need a good amount of technical skill to fix any problems you may get.
I'd recommend looking for the .rpm versions of the software that you want. The fact that you have asked this question means that you are probably at the early end of the learning process (and no shame in that) but I suspect that you will find building programs from the source code can be hit-and-miss and may well be very frustrating if you encounter any problems.
Cheers,
Mike