Montana Jones

Linux

L_:

Those Red Hat disks you burned for me, one of them doesn't read. It's like disk two or three. I couldn't get it to install.

Me:

Bummer. It must have been either a bad download or a bad burn. Want me to try again?

L_:

No, I just went back to DOS. Making cute little text boxes and stuff for my payroll program.

Me:

You know the distro that I have been hearing about a lot lately, supposed to be really good for Linux newbies is Ubuntu.

L_:

Choosing a version is all about what you want to do with it. But the thing is, and this is where I cant find any information, is how do you put a new program into Linux? Maybe I need to re-read my books again and pay better attention but I haven't figured that out.

Me:

I know what you mean. I got stopped pretty much at the same point in my learning curve. I have had some success with RPM. The Red Hat Package Manager.

L_:

But a lot of these download sites on the net don't use packages.

Me:

Or they just give you source code and tell you to compile it.

L_:

Or they give you the source. I don't know what to do with that.

Me:

It's like one of those things that's so basic everyone assumes you know how and so no one bothers to teach what to do.

L_:

And I can't figure out where to put anything. You have to deal with dependencies and you have these TGZ files and I just don't know where to put anything in that file system. I can't find help on it; it's not intuitive. I can't put new programs on Linux.

Posted by: Montana Jones / 8:20 PM