Back to Slack...

[vwgtiturbo]

Cool... and it really makes sense, I suppose. I will cross my fingers on this one... OH... to see a log of what happened with the conf/make/makeinstall, would I just need to reference the system log, or...? Could I do that, or would I need to add some redirection to the command line, to redirect errors to a file?

[gaxprels]

One more question... if you are running configure/make/makeinstall, and there are errors, does it dump alot of garbage files in the directory (that you need to get rid of before trying again)?

usually this is the scenario:
if ./configure breaks, it will tell you what file was missing to make it break, and may include information in a "config.log" file as well.

if make breaks, it will tell you what file it was compiling when it broke, and tell you what line and what reason... you can try to figure it out from there.

if make install breaks, most of the time, it's because you need root privs to install it to the given directory... so do a "sudo make install" instead (assuming you use sudo) OR "su" to root, then "make install"

[vwgtiturbo]

What dictates where a program is installed, via make install? I am just curious because let's say I install something as root, but want to make it available to other users. I am guessing that the install directory would need to allow other users, and I could just link to that directory...

Sorry for the flood of questions, but I have only used RPM so I have a little bit of a learning curve...

[gaxprels]

Ok, usually things get installed into your /usr/local prefix... for instance, the man pages would be in /usr/local/man/ the binaries in /usr/local/bin/ and/or /usr/local/sbin/ so on

With most programs, you can pass a parameter to "./configure" to make it install into "/usr" as the prefix instead of "/usr/local"

./configure --prefix=/usr

[vwgtiturbo]

You are awesome... thanks alot for the help!

[kfx]

You dig slack? I dig slack too.

Don't use make install, though. Use checkinstall.

http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/

It's simple. Checkinstall is the last program you'll ever have to make install on. Instead, you do ./configure; make; checkinstall and it asks you a few questions, and spits out a slack package that you can install with either pkgtool or installpkg! It also generates .rpm and .deb packages, but why you'd want to sleep on that bed of nails is beyond me.

Short story: checkinstall makes packages easily so you only ever have to compile once.

[gaxprels]

Short story:* checkinstall makes packages easily so you only ever have to compile once.

Not exactly. checkinstall creates slackware packages, but that doesn't mean you won't ever have to install again, it only makes it easier to compile on one machine so you can install via packages on multiple slackware machines via the created package. If you need to change any ./configure options and recompile, or upgrade the program with a newer version, then you will have to do another compile.

[SkyNet]

I hope the next Slackware release comes out before I get my HDD cleaned up, because I'm so moving back over.

[friskydrifter]

yea i moved to slack after redhat - thourght about fedora but find i really enjoy using slack more, so slack it remains