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Friday, October 07, 2005

The Different Install Packages Available in Linux



In Windows you usually look for a .msi, or .exe file to install a new
software.

In Linux you are usually given .bin, .rpm, .deb, .tgz, or .bz2

First lets tackle .bin files because they are the easiest to install.

1. First let us get a .bin file, go to java.sun.com

2. Download the jdk-1_5_0_05-linux-i586.bin ( this file is quite large
47mb so if you could get your hands on any smaller .bin file please
do so. Remember that we are just using this file as an example)

3. Open up a terminal (refer to my earlier post on how to do this)

4. In my case, after the browser finishes downloading, I always find
the file in /home/anthony/Desktop but on some system, downloads are
usually stored on your home directory, say /home/anthony

5. Assuming your file is in /home/anthony, enter the following command

$ chmod 775 jdk-1_5_0_05-linux-i586.bin

this will make the downloaded file exectutable

6. then type

$ ./jdk-1_5_0_05-linux-i586.bin

the program will automatically install

7. to check if the program really did install
simply type

$ ls

if you see a blue jdk1.5.0_05 in your list it means that the software
was installed.


I used 2 commands here that you are not familiar with (chmod and ls)
to see what these commands do type

$ man ls

or

$ man chmod


Good luck.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

====
.deb vis-a-vis java
====

In a Debian-based system, it might be advisable to create the .deb out of a popular .bin like jdk-1_5_0_05-linux-i586 to enable other components to determine the presence of the installed software (in this case, JDK 5.0).

What will happen if the .bin is installed is that necessary symlinks of java and javac in /usr/bin has to be created and JAVA_HOME may need to be exported in startup scripts runtime everytime a java-based program runs (depending on needs).

Some software require the knowledge of where the JRE/JDK install dir is instead of just locating the java executable. One example is SJAS/NetBeans install.

Unknown said...

I really appreciate that you have used your time explaining. I am new in linux and it has been very helpfull