Installing New Programs onto SUSE system
Novell Cool Solutions: Question & Answer
Q:
MA wrote: Yes, I am new to Linux. I have installed SUSE Pro onto an older system for testing and learning purposes. This operation system really does handle much different than the Windows boxes that I have become accustom to.
My question is, How do I go about installing new programs into/onto this SUSE system? Having heard great things about a program called Gnutella, I thought that giving it a try would be worthwhile. It seems that I will need to redirect YOU or YaST to some other server but how? Is there an easy or more direct way to accomplish some of the tasks that Windows makes thoughtless?
I am currently reading the SUSE Linux Bible, and any direction you could point me into should be a help. Thanks for any help you are able to give.
A:
To install new programs, you can use the YaST installer as long as it is an RPM.
I usually find the program I want as an RPM, download it, use Konqueror to view it, click on it and click on YaST to install it. It will tell you about missing libraries et al.
If the package is not RPM, you can use alien to convert it.
If you don't mind installing over the net, something I'm always wary about, you can use Ximian RedCarpet which will do the dependencies.
There are other programs like the Debian apt-get which you can get for RPMs.
Most of my tech head friends like the one that comes with Gentoo, as you download the source, all the dependencies, and compile it optimised for your architecture, but I don't know if this is available for SUSE.
If it's a source package and you have to compile it, then I suggest you use checkinstall for the install phase as this will create an RPM and put it in your RPM database.
The source configure stage will tell you about missing dependencies.
True, Linux is not Windows, as it is a work in progress towards a 21st century computer, not an incremental rehash of a 1984 workstation. Stomfi
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