Fedora question 1

[madrino]

Fellow techies,

I have installed Fedora and I am in the process of trying to learn linux. Can anyone tell me how to install programs on linux. I am currently trying to install mozilla firefox and I extracted the tar.gz file to the desktop. It says it does not come with a installer. Any help will be appreciated. If you can also recommend some sources that might help me on me on learning linux I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you in advance for your help.

 

[thedaver]

http://www.tek-tips.com/faq.cfm?spid=54

http://www.ltdp.org/

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[RhythmAce]

Fedora uses the rpm package manager. To install a package, you would type the following command:

rpm -ivh packagename.rpm (you can use wildcards instead of file name)

The -ivh stand for install, verbose and hash. The hash means you want it to use little dash marks to show you the progress. If you are upgrading a package you would use -Uvh. For more info "man rpm". If you can't get the rpm version, then another option is the tarball. These files usually need to be compiled on your system but isn't as scary as it sounds. Most of the hard work is already done for you. First step is to untar the tarball using the following command:

tar -zxvf packagename.tar.gz (wildcards ok here too)

This will unpack the file into its own sub-directory under the current directory.

Change to the new directory and issue the following commands:

,/configure
make
make install

Some packages have option to put on the ./configure command line but that's about it. Not too scary eh?

 

[madrino]

Thank you both for your quick responses.

bash: ./configure: No such file or directory

I changed to the directory for firefox and tried running the the commands tried running the ./configure command.

Does that make any sense?

 

[RhythmAce]

These were just rules of thumb. I wasn't suggesting that you will never have to read the docs that come with the package. Generally there will be a README file or INSTALL file that will help you get the thing up and running. Sometimes they use a shell script such as install.sh that you need to run. I can't imagine there aren't instrucions with it. A program that doesn't tell you how to install it wouldn't be much good would it? By the way, the ./ in front of a command means to execute the script by that name from the current directory so you'll need to make sure that configure is in the directory where you are issuing the command from.