Ok, I have downloadet a program frome the internet, before you ask and flame me yes I am a noob. But thats not the problem. My problem is. How do I install it so I can run it in the terminal window.

The file is .tgz and when i extract it I get a folder with lots of "c" documents and that sorts. I know the basic of programing in Windows. With that I mean the language c++, c# and VB 6.0 and .NET

But in Linux !!! I am blank. I did youst start to try to learn it. The verson I am runing is named sabayon not ubuntu as most people do. But I guess that dosent matter the way to install files are well bascliy the same right?

Thanks for all the help. And I am sorry if I have taken your time with something that was only some pice of trash.

Try this.


./configure
make
make install


Let me know.


Prashant,

For additional information, a majority of applications like that have a README file which has notes about the application and a file called INSTALL which has instructions on how to create the binary. You should make a habit of reading the README file and always read the INSTALL file in case you need to ensure other things are present or the correct switches are used for the configure script.

Carl

BOFH you are right





Prashant,

Windows depends on Visual Studio for development, for the most part. UNIX uses makefiles, which are kind of batch-files on steroids. The usual series of steps in compiling a program:

• ./configure
  This file checks out your system and creates an appropriate makefile. You can give it various options on things like where to install to. See ./configure --help for details.
• make
  This searches for a makefile in your current directory, finds it, and executes it's default target, namely the program.
• make install
  This executes a different target, which attempts to install the given programs into the directories ./configure chose. It might not be able to if you don't have permission to write to those directories, which means you may need to run this step as root. none of the other steps need to be run as root.

But what is your distribution? Most distributions except Gentoo use archives full of binary files that've been built for you, not source files. It's best to cooperate with your distro as much as you can rather than injecting stuff under it, fight it too much and it'll fight back.

Thanks for the replays. But nothing of the thing you did suggest for me did work. When I try make... It only say "Nothing to be done for ... *thefile*"
And the ./configure do it only say no such file og directory and the make install dident work. Then did it only say "Nothing to be done for ... install".

Are there some other ides?