Installing problem

[pacmansrancor]

I'm having trouble installing a few things... I removed PHP and Apache to install a different version of both. I installed them, and everything went fine during installation, though when I do:

make &&
make file

Everything seems to work fine, but nothing gets installed. Any suggestions would be great. Thanks in advance

[dylunio]

erm, to install you also need to use:

make install

the general way of installing all source software is

./configure
make
make install

though you should read the program's README and INSTALL files beforhand for any other options.

[Krendoshazin]

Installing directly from source has the habit of making you loose track of what's installed, and you may soon find that there's something you can't uninstall as the source didn't provide the option to do so.
The best way to get around this is to create a package from the source, sounds hard? not at all, here's how you do it:

First compile the source as per usual, 'configure', 'make', once this is done create a new folder which we'll be using next, 'mkdir tmp'.
After this use the command 'make install DESTDIR=`pwd`/tmp', the back slashes around pwd are important as they cause the command to replace itself with its output.

There's no need to be root for any of this, it's all done locally. Now we want to do 'cd tmp' and become root, you'll notice the files in tmp are in a nice order, /usr/local etc.
From here do 'makepkg packagename.tgz' and allow it to do it's work, you've now created a package from the source you've compiled.

All that's left to do now is install the package with 'installpkg', it's better to be safe than sorry, so checking what the file will do once installed doesn't hurt.
This can be done with 'installpkg -warn filename.tgz > filename.log'.

Try this out a few times untill you get the hang of it.

[kern]

so do you advise against 'checkinstall' ? I've been using it with no problems (so far) although its only been a few months.

they seem fine though.

[Krendoshazin]

Sort of yes and no, I used to use it before I learned to make packages by hand, it's a good program but I always recommend people learn things for themselves, it comes down to maintaining a level of control you wouldn't otherwise get.

Also with the method I described compared to checkinstall, you can compile, for example, all of the xfce components and combine them into one package, also the ability to mock install a package rather than actually install to check what it will do comes in useful.

[kern]

good points there

also checkinstall fails when theres no 'make install' target or no makefile, or if its a random package you just want to make from say , some xine win32 codecs for example.

I'll have to try it out.