Having just downloaded firefox I thought I'd install it...
Doesn't Mandrake distribute a pre-built & configured version of Firefox?
I would be confident that it does, so perhaps you should check your Software Update stuff, like we were discussing over the last couple of days.
The advantages of that method are basically that all the hard work has been done for you, and that dependancies are taken care of.
I've untared the file I downloaded but I can't find a read me...
There is by convention a README and an INSTALL file in a source distribution folder. It would be odd, but not impossible, for these to be missing.
./configure make make install
Absolutely, yes, except for one little thing ... make install should be "sudo make install" or "su -c make install" because you're not building the thing as root, are you? :-)
The configure stage will halt if there are missing dependancies (like the -dev libraries for things) and it's up to you to manually identify and fix. Also, unless you tell configure differently, it will install into /usr/local/bin, which is "normal" for non-package-maintained software.
-jim
