How on earth do you install a program on SUSE Linux? I have dowloaded the program SNORT and I have no earthly idea how to install it. I am not at all familiar with Linux and when I open the folder I downloaded, I see no executable files. The filename of the file I downloaded is snort-2.6.1.tar.gz

1. Any answers as to how I might accomplish the installations of this would be greatly appriciated.
2. It's probably easier just to find the rpm.

   http://rpmfind.net

   You can use RPMs from previous versions of Suse, I.e. 10.1, 10.0

   and to install an rpm it is as follows (all of this is done at a console):

   $ su (enter password)
   $ rpm -Uvh nameofrpm.version.rpm

   where U = update. It's always better to use this than I, since you'll be using rpm's built in cleanup feature
   v = verbose, it'll tell you what it's doing
   h = hash marks - gives you a progess bar

   Don't download any rpms that say blahblah.src.rpm… because it's as you can guess, the source files.

   The reason why I suggest an rpm over source, is that in my experience the libraries in SUSE aren't where some programs are expecting them. With RPMS, someone's already compiled it to take it into account.

   RPMS aren't fun, unfortunately, and this is a big reason why I switched to debian (where if you wanted to get snort, you'd type in 'sudo aptitude install snort' and be done with it).

3. How then, do you compile the source code into a .rpm?
4. I don't know much about Linux but I'll give it a shot.

   The tar.gz extension is a compressed file (tarball) and probably will contain sourcecode for the program. You have to compile the source to get the program.
   Also, the executable file you'd think of when installing software is exe or msi, on Linux it's rpm.

   *edit*
   Try using these commands, also you may want to check the source link where I got this info from, it seems like it has all you need to know.

   ./configure
   make
   make install

   The above commands can take some time to complete (1 min? 0.5 h?). If any of them fail, it might be an idea to read the README or INSTALL or whatever info is provided with the new program. Some programs may require customization of the environment (e.g. definition of their path) or installation of an additional library, or yet something else. It can sometimes be a pain. Very simple programs might not need the "./configure" or/and "make install" step, in which case "make" alone will do.

   Fifth, if everything goes well, I find the new executable which I just compiled. The names of executables display in green when running this command:

   ls –color

   Now, I can run the executable, for example:

   ./the_executable

   Some programs automatically install the executable to /usr/local/bin, so I may want to try:

   /usr/local/bin/the_executable

Tags: linux cluster, red hat linux 9