I know this has been rather answered already, but here's my two cents:
I use Fedora Core 1 + apt-get. I try to never, ever, ever download and compile tarballs--it just makes things a huge mess and creates dependency problems and uninstall problems etc. etc. So far, for the past year or so since I've been doing this, I've been entirely successful. I _have_ downloaded and compiled some programs, but I always keep them in my home directory (I never "make install") so they're easy to get rid of when the time comes.
You can still "make install" them, just make sure you run configure like this:
./configure --prefix=/home/username/someprogram
Then after a make install you'll see all the subdirectories like bin, lib, share, man, etc. Just put /home/username/someprogram/bin in your path and you are pretty much there. If you ever want to get rid of it you can do the make uninstall if you kept the source around, or you can just type
'rm -rf /home/username/someprogram'
With this you can even keep multiple compiled versions around if you like, each in /home/username/someprogram_<version>. Just don't try this with evolution, for some reason it still messed up all my gnome settings, probably because of conflicts somewhere down in my ~/.gnome* stuff. In general, I totally agree with what Ross said, resist the urge, bite on a stick, and don't install anything that's not in the rpm repository. It'll make your life much easier. Soren's suggestion to try the rpmbuild --rebuild trick with a src rpm first is very smart too.
Bryan
_______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies
