- First, you need to \\"unzip\\" the archive you downloaded. Unix uses two programs here: gzip and tar. gzip does the (un)compression and tar (which stands for Tape ARchiver) archives entire directories into one file. You can identify tar and gzipped files by their endings:
foo.tar.gz
here foo is tar\\'d and gzipped. First, unzip with
gunzip foo.tar.gz
wait. wait. wait. it\\'s done. Now foo.tar.gz has been replaced by a file called foo.tar. The next step is un-tar as such
tar xvf foo.tar
x means extract, v means verbose and f means, uh, something really important that i forget. you will see a million file names whizz past. you are now left with a directory that contains all the source code you want to compile calle foo/
- All the instructions you should need will be found in a file called either INSTALL or README in the directory where the source code you want to compile is. Read these things! If i had a dollar for every install i f**\\'d up by being too cocky... i\\'d buy lunch. a biiig lunch. having said that, most compile procedures follow this routine
./configure
make
make install
all these commands are of course run from the top level of the source dir. With php, the configure step is important... read the docs first! you will be choosing which modules to include here (like postgresql support) Configure scripts tend to be really smart and can guess all sorts of things about your system. Respect the people who build them. Make is just a compiler front end that ensures that all code is compiled in the correct order. Make install does just that, it moves all the appropriate pieces to the appropriate places. If you screw up badly, lots of software has a \\"make uninstall\\". If you screw up your configuration and would like to wipe it clean \\"make clean\\" will do that for you.
That is the ultra-short crash course. The place to go for linux how to\\'s is www.linuxdoc.org
