basic installations rpm and tar.gz?

[toypiano]

i am trying to install jmax and amber. They are tar.gz and i have the rpm of jmax. I am running caldera 2.3 i believe? the second newest one. it says it cannot open (enter vagueness) rpms with 3 of ____. With the tar.gz i used tar -zxvh and got it to open amber. Then later i found where it installed it (/root) and tried to do the same to amber again and to jmax tar.gz. But now it won't do anything I type the command and it sits in the window one line down doing nothing for minutes and not allowing me to do anything else in the window. SO i took the unpacked amber and tried to go to the directory (sucessful) and type make (failed) it says something about a g++ error? Any hints for basic installation of programs I have never really gotten the hang of it

thanks, todd

[fancypiper]

You need to upgrade your rpm package to a newer package.

Do you have the packages installed to compile? (development).

[Stween]

You could always try reading this NHF (http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/compiling/softinstall.html) ... if your problems are just with decompressing and compiling then i think that link should provide some support :)


Stween

[toypiano]

i think that nhf helped. I will reboot into linux later and try it out :)

[toypiano]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You need to upgrade your rpm package to a newer package.
Do you have the packages installed to compile? (development).

--------------------
what does that mean? I will probably figure out how to update my rpm we will see :)

todd

[toypiano]

i read the nhf... i got the whole tar -zxvf thing down. Every file I have installed fails. Usually i type make or ./configure and it says no such directory or command or something. A few of them say that i need g++ or something. Any help would be appreciated as I seem to be able to unpack the tar files but never get further than that. Also with rpm files on some of them I can run the rpm thing or just do rpm -ivh but then it disappears and I have no clue where to find it or what to do with it then


thanks, todd

[slapNUT]

A few of them say that i need g++ or something


If a
./configure or
make
fails and says you need something you should look for the package either tar/gz or rpm and install it. Its good to install as many development packages as you can, you never know when a package will need something.

Also with rpm files on some of them I can run the rpm thing or just do rpm -ivh but then it disappears and I have no clue where to find it or what to do with it then.


If you do this:
rpm -ivh bla_bla-1.1.rpm
and it works without an error then do this:
rpm -q --dump bla_bla-1.1.rpm
to see where the files went.

[fancypiper]

You don't have a compiler installed. You will need to install GNU Compiler Collection (http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc.html) to be able to compile programs. If you have an installation disc, it should be on it unless it is one of the smaller distros. You will also find it on your distro's website.

I ususally install with the upgrade flags rpm -Uvh <name>

If no error messages show, then it has successfully installed when the prompt returns.

You also need to visit rpm.org (http://rpm.org/) and get a newer rpm package to use rpm to install the programs that told you the newer package was needed.

Here are some rpm commands that may be helpful.
Try these in a console. These commands use piping (|) and re-direction (> ), 2
powerful commands you have in Linux. Check your local documentation for your distro. It will have a fuller explanation of these tools.

Q: What do I have installed?
A: rpm -qa | sort

Q: What do all of these packages do?
A: rpm -qai >~/rpm.descr; less ~/rpm.descr
Now use '/' to search for a keyword and 'n' for the next occurrence.

Q: What is the command to start the application?
A: rpm -ql | grep '/bin/'
This will give you some choices most of the time. A more refined solution is:
for f in `rpm -ql `; do test -d $f || (test -x $f && echo $f); done

Q: What kind of documentation is available for the package?
A: rpm -qd

Q: What are the configuration files for the package?
A: rpm -qc

Q: How many configuration files are there altogether?
A: rpm -qca | wc -l

Q: How much space do they use up?
A: rpm -qca | xargs du -skc

[slapNUT]

Q: What do I have installed?
A: rpm -qa | sort

Q: What do all of these packages do?
A: rpm -qai >~/rpm.descr; less ~/rpm.descr
Now use '/' to search for a keyword and 'n' for the next occurrence.

Q: What is the command to start the application?
A: rpm -ql | grep '/bin/'
This will give you some choices most of the time. A more refined solution is:
for f in `rpm -ql `; do test -d $f || (test -x $f && echo $f); done

Q: What kind of documentation is available for the package?
A: rpm -qd

Q: What are the configuration files for the package?
A: rpm -qc

Originally posted by fancypiper
Q: How many configuration files are there altogether?
A: rpm -qca | wc -l

Q: How much space do they use up?
A: rpm -qca | xargs du -skc


I nominate this as most informative post of the month!

[toypiano]

cool thanks :) I have caldera. Unfortunately I only have 3gb so I don't want to just install everything (1.1gb). I will try to sort through it though. All your advice is great. I like the dsoftware options for linux and if i could ever get stuff installed then i would switch over completely from windows. :)


todd