Build from Source Code

I regularly install software by downloading a file and then running the installer, In this post I'll share my experience building two software packages to install on my Fedora system through the build process. When building packages, there are some that are easier and some harder packages to build as I found out.

First, I downloaded a group of development tools and development libraries using yum.
yum groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries"

From there I went to the GNU software collection where I selected many packages to try and build. Some packages were harder to build as I experienced when configuring the source code. The reason for this was that some of those packages required other packages which I did not have and so caused an error!. One of those errors when configuring was from not having "GTK+" which is the Gimp Tool Kit.

Two software packages that was fairly easy to build that I installed are:
barcode ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/barcode/barcode-0.98.tar.gz
gnuchess http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/chess/gnuchess-6.0.1.tar.gz

The command to download from command line using "wget"
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/barcode/barcode-0.98.tar.gz
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/chess/gnuchess-6.0.1.tar.gz

After downloading these two tarball files, I unzipped them using "tar" with the options "xvzf" for extract,verbose,gzip and file.
tar xvzf barcode-0.98.tar.gz
tar xvzf gnuchess-6.0.1.tar.gz

This is what the tarball files looks like in red and the blue folder is whats created after using tar. 

Then change to the new directory with the cd command. Within the new directory there is a script called configure that will configure the build. I ran the script by entering ./configure

After the script ran with no errors I used the time command with the make script to build the software. The result of time make for both packages

barcode
real    0m2.316s
user    0m1.353s
sys    0m0.299s

gnuchess
real    0m2.806s
user    0m0.387s
sys    0m0.374s

After make ran successful, I entered make install to install the software. Finally to test that these builds are successful, I entered gnuchess and barcode from the command line to have these packages run.

My First Blog Post

Hello I am a student studying in Seneca College's Computer Systems Technology program. The interest that I have in computers come from the fascination of  the power it has to connect people together from everywhere in the world. The purpose for this blog is so that I can post topics regarding to Open Source material that I will be using and learning about.

One really interesting from few days ago was in my Software Build and Release class at school. It was a Raspberry Pi, a super small computer that will cost around $35 which also has the power to play HD videos and displays impressive graphics for its size.I think this is an awesome way to get younger people interested in computers.