Jamie Griffin wrote: > I'm new to Linux and bought my machine with ubuntu 7.10 this week. > I've been using Mac osx for the last 6 months and so i'm still very > much in the learning stages.
Enjoy. :) > I've got a lot of stuff to read to teach myself, but having been > using Mutt on my Mac i want to get it up and running on my Linux > machine as quickly as possible. Using the packages from Ubuntu might be the fastest way. After you get more comfortable, if you find that you want to enable different compile time options or patches than what is included in the ubuntu package, you can do that. Of course, if you're used to building from source on osx, building on linux shouldn't be much different. You'd just need to get the build dependencies installed. For something like mutt that is already packaged, you can use apt to do this. Something like: apt-get builddep mutt (Check the man page, as I'm going from memory, and I haven't had any caffeine nor sugar yet today. :) > Before i attempt it, i wanted to ask for some tips on how best to > download the source and build it myself (presumably using > ./configure, make and make install commands). That would do it. There are a large number of options you can pass to configure to enable and disable various features, some of which you probably want to use. See ./configure --help for a listing. > also, which directory should i compile it in - is there one i should > use/create for programs like Mutt? On my Mac system, i had it > installed in /sw as i followed some instruction from a site i found > on the web, but i don't fully understand why this directory was > used? That's mostly just personal preference. Most of the time, I build things as packages, but if I'm building from source, I use something like ~/src as the location for building. I would suggest doing the configure and make steps as a normal user, and only using root for the make install portion. Even better than that would be to build your .deb package. That gives you the benefits of compiling your own mutt from source (your own configure options, patches, etc) as well as the benefits of having mutt installed via package (you can use dpkg to query the package contents, easily install that package on any other systems you have, easily remove it, etc). While learning to build packages isn't something you'll likely learn to do in the first few days of using your new system, it's not really much harder than learning to build the software via configure; make; make install. I find it highly valuable. I have more experience building rpm packages than debs, but I setup a Debian box for some testing a while back and learned how to create basic .deb packages in an afternoon, by skimming through the Debian New Maintainers' Guide at http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ > I'm aware i could use sudo apt-get install, but wasn't sure if this > would install an older version of Mutt, or indeed if it's best to > avoid this and install it manually. Looking at http://packages.ubuntu.com/ it appears that Ubuntu 7.10 ships with mutt-1.5.15. So the package is a few revisions behind. If you want the most recent version, you'll need to build it from source (or rebuild the .deb package from the forthcoming Ubuntu release: http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/mutt). -- Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ It's reassuring to know that if you behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for you.
pgpcpTDJRpDHp.pgp
Description: PGP signature
