On Thursday 17 Jun 2004 08:12, OOzy wrote: > What is a good practice?? Is it to install programs from source or RPM?
For a newbie RPM for sure. That way you will not have to post when compiling does not work. Seriously. While compiling from source can be fun. There is a down side. It is difficult to *uninstall* apps compiled from source. You have to preserve the folder you used for compiling and run 'make uninstall' to get rid of it. The second problem is anything you install from source will not appear in the RPM database and so the system will not know it is there. This can be a problem if you have compiled a library because urpmi may try to overwrite the library with an RPM, or you could get into a dependency issue. The third problem is that RPMs contain scripts and patches to tune the app for the Mandrake environment. So for example you will not get a menu entry on something you compile yourself. If you want to compile from source the best way is either to use an app called checkinstall which will turn the compiled binary into an RPM and install that, or to compile from a src RPM. You can edit an existing src RPM to use an updated version of the source tarball quite easily. There is a guide to compiling src RPMs here http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RpmHowTo derek -- www.jennings.homelinux.net http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org
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