Hello,
This being my second installment I’m starting to read my first prerequisite
-
Software-Building-HOWTO http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Building-HOWTO.html
This is a comprehensive guide to building and installing “generic” Unix software packages under Linux.
The first problem I’ve run into here is there seems to be many different kinds of packaging…. tar or gz or bz2 all different programs all requiring different commands to ” unpack” . Windows has been easy on me just click on it and bingo it’s installed.
Not so lucky here , I have to learn about how to unpack source files…. o, O…
I’m in trouble already….
The above method of unpacking “tarballs” is equivalent to either of the following:
- gzip -cd filename | tar xvf –
- gunzip -c filename | tar xvf –
(The ‘-‘ causes the tar command to take its input from stdin.)
What in the heck is “stdin”? time to google….
Ok, I got it… stdin = standard input .. hrmmm…. OK..
this begs the question what’s standard input?
Standard input is data (often text) going into a program. The program requests data transfers by use of the read operation. Not all programs require input. For example, the dir or ls program (which displays file names contained in a directory) performs its operation without any stream data input.
ok … so I type the command and the computer reads what I type as “stdin” and then the program does what I told it ? I think…
but the “-” is in front of the cd in the commandline? I thought that would be part of the gzip command…
I think I need to go back to the prerequisites and look at the list again. I’m confused. Maybe another prerequisite is more important than software building at this point.
ahh..
The Linux Users’ Guide http://www.linuxhq.com/guides/LUG/guide.html
As I’m reading down the page , I’m a bit overwhelmed by some of the information and jump ahead to the part that says who should read this book
Ok, I’m good .. but wait .. there’s another link ” what you should have done before reading this book.”
Ok, I should have an intel x86 pc with Linux installed.
Next you should have created a User , not to run as the administrator.
It goes on to say that you should know some computer terms… I might be in a bit of trouble depends on the word..
This book goes on to say experiment, read the man pages installed , myself I find that man is not enough.. info pages are far better and google also has alot of information about each program , sometimes I even go to the home page of the program , I’ve backed up to do this blog… in my adventures so far It took me about 2 or 3 hours just to learn how to download from a list of source files using the wget program, but it was well worth it. I found it very refreshing to see all those programs download … silly I know but it took alot of work , more than I’d ever tried on Windows. I was ignorant enough the first few times to point and click on each of … I think it was about 80+ files to build LFS. Took a long time…. so I ‘m starting to see some really neat stuff about Linux.
OK … this looks like I’ve found the right place to start…. maybe I should let them know that the users guide would be better placed at the top of the list.On the LFS website.
whew, it’s a bit deep… After some experience with Linux, I know one thing where it pertains to me. I can’t just read something. I have to study it and If I’m ever going to properly build LFS, I ‘ll have to learn alot more than just what’s been written on the pages of the prerequisites.
My own education it’s now becoming painfully obvious is less than it needs to be as I’m studing these pages .. I’m running into words like fork, signal mask, synchronous and asynchronous…
Google to the rescue!!!
next blog- Unix Shell …oh boy š
