Installing Software Packages — Part One

Bill McCarty

Tuesday, August 15th, 2000

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If Microsoft Windows 9x has one good feature, it’s the installer — the program that helps you install and remove programs. The installer is a significant improvement over earlier program installation facilities. In the days of MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, software installation was something of a hit or miss proposition. For exam-ple, if you installed a program to a specific folder, rather than accepting the default folder, you often found that the program failed to work.

Software installation under Linux is not quite yet as convenient as that under Windows 9x. Still, as Linux has grown up over the last several years, the situation has gotten better. Today, all of the Linux distributions use package managers for software installation. Before the advent of package managers, unless you really knew what you were doing, installing software under Linux was definitely not a day at the beach. Now, maybe it’s more like a rainy day at the beach.

Because there are so many different ways to install software, there is much more material than can be covered in one article. So welcome to the first article in our three-part series on software installation. It probably makes sense to cover the most popular Linux package managers first (the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) and the Debian package manager), so that’s where we’re going to start. Over the next two months, we’ll discuss how to install software that has not been nicely pre-packaged for easy installation.

What Good is…