LINUX v. Windows

[Army of GOD]

Next, you'll need to learn how to unpack tarballs and compile programs from source. It's kind of like an initiation ritual, after that you'll be one of us forever. Then you'll grow a neckbeard and spend all your time preaching about open source on internet forums.

I already know how to unpack tarballs, thank you very much.

[Army of GOD]

don't do it aog! you must not succumb to the dark side! stay here with us. we have a beautiful sexy glossy gui... and an easy to navigate file system... and games, LOTS of games. don't you like games? here, play some pinball.

Installed wine and then Trackmania.

ALL THE GAME ILL EVER NEED

[natty dread]

I already know how to unpack tarballs, thank you very much.

You need to do it on the command line or it doesn't count.

tar -xf hairyballs.tar.xz ~/tmp
mkdir ~/hairyballs
cd ~/tmp
./configure prefix=~/hairyballs
make
make install

(disclaimer: sometimes you need extra parameters for make, sometimes there is no configure script (there might be an autogen.sh instead), sometimes you only need to run make install instead of make and then make install, you should always refer to the INSTALL or README file which is supplied with the source to see how it should be compiled).

If the compilation fails, it probably means you're missing some dependencies. The error message you get from either configure or make will probably let you know what those are, if not you can also refer to the README or INSTALL files. Then just apt-get any libraries you need and run the compilation again.

sudo apt-get install libhair libballs libballs-dev
./configure prefix=~/hairyballs
make
make install


themoreyouknow.gif

[nietzsche]

what is that app that let's you keep track of the installed shit via make install? so you can uninstall easily in case you need..

[natty dread]

what is that app that let's you keep track of the installed shit via make install? so you can uninstall easily in case you need..

I think you're talking about checkinstall. sudo apt-get install checkinstall and then you just usually run it instead of "make install". It creates .deb packages from the source and installs them.

Afterwards you should run sudo ldconfig to make sure all the libraries can be found by the system.