On Friday 18 March 2005 15:56, Sid Boyce wrote:
Chaitanya Krishna A wrote:
hi all,
thanks for the help on the migration from centos to suse.
i am research student, so i frequently need to install software related to my work from the sources (the usual thing of making and compiling).
Good on you.
as i'm new to suse, i want to know how easy it is build from sources and install software with suse. it would be nice if anyone would clarify on these points. i am planning to use suse 9.1 professional version on my machine.
1. is it possible to install additional software which comes as source and not as rpms?
Much the same way as in any distro apart from gentoo which additionally has emerge, though you can do normal installs on gentoo also. You can do the normal"make install" or use "checkinstall" which will generate a RPM so you can install or upgrade a package and keep the RPM database honest.
2. can yast be useful in the above respect?
Yes, you can point YaST at a local directory to install or update RPM's you have built.
Sid: I'm afraid you did not understand question 1. completely. YaST can be helpfull when installing rpm packages. YaST cannot be helpfull when *purely* installing from source. As the OP is talking about source, and specifically excludes rpms in question 1., IMO the answer to question 2. has to be: No. ;)
3. as far as i know, yast normally updates the softwares based on the updates provided by suse. in case the software that i need is not provided by suse, then what do i do?
The stuff above covers that. Treat any distro as Linux and you already know the basics, the differences lie mainly in where they choose as default install locations, e.g SuSE uses /opt/kde3 configure prefix, Mandrake uses /usr and gentoo /usr/kde/3.x I think, the tools they use are also different and easy to get used to. The apt4RPM is much the same as apt in Debian and apt4RPM on RedHat. I have SuSE 9.2 x86 and x86_64, Mandrake 10.1 and gentoo installed on separate boxes. I have no trouble installing from sources on any of them.
See http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/, and http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/9.1-i386/ The latter contains apt 9.1-i386 repositories, RPMS.* contain .i?86.rpm's, SRPMS.* contain the .src.rpm's. Tip: if you decide to use apt, start with only a few repositories (base, security and update). Only add repositories if you need them. Cheers, Leen