Greetings all- Is there a way to learn or a command that you issue to determine if you have all the needed "stuff" for a program to work? I sometimes go to the Debian Package site and I will see something I would like to try. Some will say that in order for the program to work, you will need this, this and this. In the past I would just try and see if it would work. If it did, great! but if it didn't I would then find out what was lacking from the errors message. I know there has to be a proper way to go about this. Thanks and all the best--
There are ways to do at least parts of this. But aside from using the dependency checking in your distro's package-management system, there is no *good* way I know of to assess this ... partly because "needed" is not well-defined.
To check if you have the needed shared libraries to run a program -- this is the one clear-cut meaning of "needed" -- you can run "ldd" on the program. It will spot anything that is missing. But there are other meanings of "needed" -- for example, MythTV needs access to working MySQL server, but since it can be on a different host, it is not a true dependency -- that are more elusive and that can really be assessed only by reading the application's documentation.
Since you use Debian, I would suggest that you change your approach from "just try" to using the apt-* installation system. It checks the dependency information in the .deb packaging system and will automatically add to any install the required dependencies. Other distros --- at least the RPM ones (how *does* Slackware handle dependencies these days?) -- have similar capabilities, but I'll leave it to someone who actually uses those distros to describe them.
This approach is only as good as the dependency information offered by the package database. This is usually pretty good but not perfect. Staying with Debian as an example, some video applications require access to libraries or other stuff (e.g., codecs) that Debian cannot or will not itself distribute due to license or patent restrictions, but that you can get from non-Debian sources. These applications will install and even run, but they will fail in some uses until you add in the supplementary stuff by hand. (In all the examples I can think of, the info you need for this is in the package docs.)
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