On August 15, 2004 08:24 pm, BJ Tracy wrote: > Hello All, > > I have a number of books on Linux and find them to be a wealth of knowledge > but they are really vague when it comes to downloads and installations. > > Can someone suggest a good book that will walk me thru a download and > installation. I may be making this harder than it is, but I have been on > MS all my life and just recently switched to Linux. It's been years since > I last did a lot of work on the keyboard(in the terminal) but I really do > like what I'm doing now in Linux. > > A couple of NEWBIE questions: > 1) When you download a program such as clamav, where should you down load > to? A temp file in the usr file? > > 2) After extracting the files form the tar, and you do a 'make' and a > 'make install' , , , , , does Linux know where to put the program files? > Just a little confused. > > Any good books on this, PLEASE ADVISE. > bj
Hi BJ, Charlie has already talked to you about urpmi and it's companion programs to download RRMs and install them. In general this is what you want to do with Mandrake or any distro that uses RPMs for installing programs. The analogy with various Windows installers is that RPM's contain the whole program plus refereces to dependancies that the program needs to run. The thing that urpmi solves is the dependancy issue. If you don't have a program or library that your program, say ClamAV, needs to function urpmi will offer to download it for you and install it. Compare that to a Windows intaller that happily installs a program and you try to run it only to be told you need a .dll or other file to actually run it. You've just run into the Windows version of dependancy hell. :-) Please not that installing from a tar file means that you'll have to, in most cases, compile the source file using gcc. And if you're a serious newbie then that can be quite daunting. Particularly if you've never used a command line compiler before. So take Charlie's advice and use urpmi both from the supplied programs and from the command line. BTW the four programs that make up the GUI to urpmi are found under System| Configuration|Packaging| and they're Install Software, Remove Software, Mandrake Update and Remove Software. There's another one called Browse Available Software that is just looking to see if something does, in fact, exist. Use these and your life will be easy. :) As for general purpose books, Charlie is right there too. There are a few general purpose Linux books around but most of them are Red Hat centric. Still, some are useful. There's even a Linux for Dummies book. :-) Remember, though, that anything published by O'Reilly is excellent and well recommended. :) Good luck! ttfn John -- *********************************************************** Composed on a 100% Microsoft Free Computer Guaranteed Virus Free Mandrake Linux 10.0 OE Registered Linux User 362316 ***********************************************************
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