[WBEL-users] [ WHITEBOX] Installing software from source?

[Jan-Albert van Ree]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 01:13:06PM -0700, Dan Bikle wrote:
> People,
> 
> I was just handed the root password to my server running Linux whitebox 4.
> 
> I'm not much of a SysAdmin but I'm handy at running shell commands
> and operating vi.
> 
> I'd like to get skilled at installing software from source.
> 
> Typically what I've done in the past is download a .tgz,
> tar zxf,
> confifigure --prefix /opt/local,
> make
> make install
> 
> On my Mac though,
> I've found a utility-website (http://darwinports.org/) which wraps the
> above sequence
> with a nice command called 'port'.

Ports is what the BSD folks and Gentoo use.
Under RedHat (and Suse/Mandrake and other RPM-based systems) you DON'T want to mess with sources generally, because they mess up the RPM packaging system. You might overwrite stuff, have issues with dependencies (since RedHat sometimes places files illogically, building KDE these days is a pain!)

To install software from source on WBEL4, you dump the tgz or whatever in /usr/src/whitebox/SOURCES , make a SPEC file in /usr/src/whitebox/SPECS/ and use rpmbuild to build both source and binary RPMs.

Do a search for the book Maximum RPM, it'll explain some basics of RPM building.

For new software I suggest looking at RPM repositories such as Dag , http://dag.wieers.com , grab either their RHEL4 binaries or grab the src.rpm and rebuild it on your box.
-- 
Jan-Albert van Ree        | http://www.vanree.net/brickpiles/
VanReeDotNet IT Solutions | http://www.vanree.net