New Linux User

HOWTO: Best Of - Installing Applications in GNU/Linux

by Jon on January 24th, 2006

I’ve had a few people recently ask me about some basic information about installing applications in GNU/Linux. That started me thinking that although I’ve written about these topics before, they’re obviously quite popular. I took a quick look at the site stats and they bear out my observation: my posts on installing applications garner a LOT of hits from Google.

Since there’s no real way to highlight those posts in a blog setting, I thought I’d steal a page out of Darren Rowse’s book and put together a ‘best-of’ post (I looked for Darren’s article, but couldn’t find it. Maybe I dreamed the entire thing). So without any further ado, here’s a quick rundown on installing applications onto your GNU/Linux box:

Identify the application you want to install (duh!)

Check your own repositories first. This means trying apt-get install progam (for Debian systems) or yum install program (for RPM systems). You may find it in your repositories and not have to go any further.

edit: Don’t know what type of system you’re running? Here’s a link to an entry I wrote on determining that.

No go? Carry on…

Try to get the proper package for your system

Visit the vendor/author website and see what file formats are available for download. If you’re running a Debian-based system (K/Ubuntu, Kanotix), see if there’s a file ending in .deb. If you’re running a Red Hat system (Suse, Fedora), see if there’s a file ending in .rpm. Note that a slackware package ends in .tgz and therefore I assume that is a gzipped tarball. However, since I have zero experience with Slackware, you’re on your own with that one!

No go? Next…

Grab the source code ‘tarball’

Many authors just don’t have the time or inclination to make distribution specific packages and will therefore only make the source code available to you. A source code file is generally indicated by a .tar.gz/.tgz/.tar.bz/.tb2 extension (the possible combinations are endless. More on that below.) If that’s all you can get, download it.

Need a quick primer on what source code is? Here’s a link to an article I wrote that explains just that.

Note that the author may supply many tarballs, each containing source code for a specific hardware platform. Here’s a quick list to the confusing world of tarball naming conventions.

Now that you have some kind of file downloaded on to your machine, here’s a link to an article I wrote detailing how to install each type of file. For quick reference, I’ll recap here, but check the link for more details.

Install an .deb package

As root: dkpg -i filename.deb

Install an .rpm package

As root: rpm -ivh filename.rpm

Install the tarball

First you have to unzip the tarball to get at the internal files. Here’s a link to an article I wrote on how to ‘untar’ various types of files.

Once you have the file untarred, check out the article I wrote on how to install the thing. For quick reference I’ll list the steps here, but check out the article for fill details:

In the directory that the file has been untarred to:

./configure
make
as root: make install

Hope that helps!

Share This

Related Stories

EXPLAIN: Piping Commands Together in GNU/Linux
Geeky Fun: Running Windows Within GNU/Linux
Will you give free and open source scientific applications a chance?
Installing applications using Kubuntu’s Adept Installer
A tip on how to install yum in RHEL 4

POSTED IN: General