Tuesday, October 11 2005 @ 12:52 AM EDT Contributed by: sde
A tutorial penned by Joe Barr that explores the world of manual installation, covering those situations where the software developer has not yet released the version/software in one of those handy .rpm's,.deb's, etc.
Read about using CheckInstall...
All the major package management tools provide easy-on/easy-off program installation and removal, so no big deal. But no matter what your favorite distribution, if you like to sample free software offerings, someday your just-gotta-have-it app is not going to be available as a package in whatever scheme your distro uses. It doesn't matter whether your distro uses Deb, RPM, or another packaging scheme: it's going to happen. You're going to have to install from source code using ./configure, make, and make install, and the app will live outside the confines of your package manager. Such apps -- installed outside the normal package management -- become difficult to remove. Why? Because there just isn't any easy way to know exactly what has to go, and that's exactly what inspired Felipe Eduardo Sánchez Díaz Durán to write CheckInstall.
