[Klug-general] Book for total newbie?

[Enquiries]

On Saturday 18 December 2004 21:26, George Prowse wrote:
> Chris Wigzell wrote:
> > Hi!
> > I am Chris Wigzell, a retired person.  I am mainly a lurker on this
> > newsgroup, and have not yet managed to get Linux running fully on my
> > computer. I have SuSe 9.1 (a free DVD), but need to install a driver
> > for my modem.  I have the driver, but have failed to work out how to
> > install it.  Can anyone recommend a small, simple (and cheap, I am a
> > pensioner) book that will help me to do the kind of things you lot
> > seem to be able to do without any effort at all?
> > I will try to come to the next meeting (Where is it? Maidstone?) and
> > bring my computer, but I would prefer to learn how to do things myself.
> > Regards,
> > Chris
>
> If you get "Linux for Dummies" It comes with a Fedora dvd and starts you
> off  at the very beginning, tarballs, tum, rpm, deb etc etc. I bought
> mine from Waterstones in Maidstone and it was £20, it comes in handy all
> the times.
>
> Installing things from source can be trickier than imagines (ask anyone
> who used slackware before swaret) because you run into whats commonly
> known as "dependency hell", what that is is when the program you
> installed needs another to run, and that program needs another, and that
> one...... and so on and so on, I use Gentoo and its package management
> "Portage" (which is based on BSD's  "ports"  reguarly  downloads 4 or 5
> programs when i just wanted one, these are the dependencies.
>
> To install tarballs (*.tar.gz and *.tgz are gzipped tarballs and
> *.tar.bz2 is a bzipped tarball) all you to is download the tarball
> (obviously) open a terminal, navigate to where you downloaded it to
> (which is normally /home/<whatever user you created> and type (for bzip)
> "tar -xvjpf  NameOfTarball.tar.bz2" or if its a .gz type "tar -xvzf
> NameOfTarball.tar.gz. Both of these have similar options associated with
> them:
>
>         "tar" is the name of the program to use,
>         "x" is extract,
>         "v" is for verbose output (not really needed but nice),
>         "f" make it operate on a specific file,
>         "j" tells it to use bzip2,
>         "z" tells it to use gzip,
>         "p" tell it not to store relative path name but instead to store
> absoloute path names
>
> After it is all extracted navigate to the folder it made and run these:
>
> ./configure
> make
> make install
>
> or if you are feeling adventurous add them all in one command:
> "./configure && make && make install"
>
> Or if you are feeling more adventurous add some gcc optimisations in
> with it, for example: CLAGS="-O2 -fomit-frame-pointer pipe" ./configure
> && make && make install
>
> I can suggest a few other things though, i'd join the Linux Junior forum
> http://www.linuxjunior.org/ and ask some questions in there, it is full
> of people who are having trouble at the start and is very friendly, they
> also have an off-topic forum and plain english tutorials.
>
> By far the best site i have come across for linux beginners is
> http://www.tuxfiles.org/ and she there goes into more depth on the
> installing that i showed above
> http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/softinstall.html
>
> Sites:
> http://www.linux.ie/newusers/beginners-linux-guide/
> http://www.linuxlinks.com/Beginners/ (also has a forum)
> http://www.linuxorbit.com/ (also has a forum)
>
> Forums
> http://www.linuxquestions.org/
> http://forums.gentoo.org/
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Kent mailing list
> Kent at mailman.lug.org.uk
> http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/kent

i'm a slackware user, i've seen a lot of people give up when they have to 
install packages from source which have dependencies. In my opinion if you 
are a beginner:

1) first check to see if the package you want is included with your distro 
already.
2) if not then go to the packages website and find a .rpm .deb etc for your 
distro (dont forget to get the correct version).
3) next try a generic rpm for the package (http://www.rpmfind.net).
4) last resort is to compile the source.

I have noticed the new users that have no programming experience have a very 
dim view of linux after an hour of trying to get a package to compile from 
source, i suppose the whole point of the distros (mandrake, redhat etc) is to 
make this process easier, so a user can click on an .rpm to install it or use 
a gui to select packages to install.

Some things worth mentioning are:
1) if you are going to install a source package, make sure you dont have an 
older version install via rpm first (rpm -qa lists all installed rpms).
2) if you install a source package (say perl for example) and another rpm that 
you install that relies on this perl it will fail and state the perl is not 
installed. This is because perl is not listed in the rpm database (it is 
installed). To fix this you end up forcing the new rpm install as you know 
the source package (perl) is already installed.

Basically be careful installing sources on an rpm distro as you can get into a 
mess when it is time to upgrade your system.  

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