Install from Source

Welcome! This is my first useful post of the year.

In most cases people who use Linux use some sort of application manager to install software, such as yum, yast, apt-get, etc... These application managers make installing software reduculously easily. The only issue is that you can only install the software version that is available in the repositories provided by the your Linux distro or by user-defined repositories which normally means that it isn't the latest stable version of that software. In this case we would either see if the software is packaged in some sort of binary package (rpm or deb in most cases). This just makes installing software and managing software a bit easier.

If your familiar with using Linux before these application managers came around you would remember that everything was manually compiled and installed which means that that software should work optimized for your computer. However, it also makes upgrading and managing software a bit more of a hassle.

Now let me show you how you would install software using yum on fedora 12 and how to install using source code.


Irssi - IRC CLI Client

Irssi is an irc client which has a very small memory footprint, allows users to create scripts to create additional features and functions.
This is how you would install it using yum:

yum install irssi

That is it! Now you can run the app by typing irssi in the terminal. howto use irssi

Now lets do it from source. irssi 0.8.14 is the latest version when I wrote this.

wget http://www.irssi.org/files/irssi-0.8.14.tar.gz
tar xzvf irssi-*.tar.gz
cd irssi-*
./configure
make
make install

*Make sure your root when you use make install.

You shouldn't run into any problems since the dependencies normally are pre-installed on most distros.

Wasn't hard to do either of the installs but with yum its a bit easier to remove or to upgrade irssi in the future.

Sometimes you get software that you can only install using the source since it isn't packaged or available in any of the public repositories. If that happens to be the case then you should follow the instructions that the application provides on how to install. An example would be NLED.
installing NLED is super easy and the website provides step by step instructions of the install procedure.