James's "Help me with Linux!" Thread

Have mercy upon me, for I'm very n00b and clueless when it comes to linux. I've got tons of questions, so I'm just going to pop them on this thread from time to time.

Ok, so first up, I installed Suse 9. It came with Kopete messenger, and I'm trying to upgrade it to the latest build. Downloaded it from the official site, unzipped it, and used terminal to navigate to the directory. Following the included instructions, once in the directory, I ran "./configure" to compile. I got this:

Code:

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configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
See 'config.log' for more details.

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Remember, you're dealing with a Windows guy here, so step me through this as if I were a complete idiot with a linux box (no comments please :D). I presume my Suse 9 didn't come with a compiler, and I need to go get one? What now?

Can I butt in too!

I am in exactly the same boat as you James I sortta got into using SuSE about a year ago but had to come away and stick with Windows due to work reasons/commitments.

I was about to start a thread with the same intention as yours, but you beat me to it!

One thing i have found very helpfull is the SuSE user guide/help centre that is installed along with the OS this can answer most fo the questions you will have but its a long process to find the right part of it!

the other thing I have learnt is that if you can find it as a RPM instead of a .tar.gz, use the RPM!!

My question is what my serial port is called, ie, in windows it is COM1, I am trying to use a program called minicom to access a few routers/switchs, part of the configuration for minicom asks me what my serial port is called, google revealed it should be "dev/tty/" but this does'nt seem to work. Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks!

//Hope you dont mind me semi-hijacking your thread!

Most likely you didn't install the c compiler. It used to be
that everyone just assumed that every installation
of linux has a c compiler, but if you did a custom install
and didn't select it...

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...04/10/3/237970

...or the system can't find the gcc executable.

It's probably easier to put in the install cd and install it,
but if it's installed and the system can't find it, you check
and add it to the PATH.
:cool:

AngelicKnight: You could also do a quick search to see if you can find the rpm for kopete. I did a quick search, and ran across this: http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat....i586.rpm.html.

Quick explanation: Most linux distributions use what's called a package manager to easily install and remove programs. RPM is the RedHat Package Manager, but it has been adopted by many other distributions like SuSE and Mandrake. Slackware uses the tgz package format, and Debian uses the deb package format. Anyway, it looks like a few nice people out there have created an rpm for kopete that you should be able to install quite easily with the command:

Code:

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rpm -i 'kopete.package.file.rpm'

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RPM is probably the most widely used package manager. You should be able to find much of the software you want in rpm format somewhare. Hope that's helpful.