[CONSPIRE] Installing software from source on Linux?

[Dan Bikle]

People,

I was just handed the root password to my server running Linux whitebox 4.

I'm not much of a SysAdmin but I'm handy at running shell commands
and operating vi.

I'd like to get skilled at installing software from source.

Typically what I've done in the past is download a .tgz,
tar zxf,
confifigure --prefix /opt/local,
make
make install

On my Mac though,
I've found a utility-website (http://darwinports.org/) which wraps the
above sequence
with a nice command called 'port'.

The way port works is that I search for things I want to install
with a command like:
port search perl

which gives me this:


zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root# port search perl
subversion-perlbindings devel/subversion-perlbindings   1.2.3  Perl
bindings for the subversion version control system.
perl5.8         lang/perl5.8    5.8.7           Perl 5.8.x - Practical
Extraction and Report Language
p5-gtk-perl     perl/p5-gtk-perl        0.7009   Bindings to Gtk+ library
p5-libintl-perl perl/p5-libintl-perl    1.14     Perl
internationalization library
p5-libwww-perl  perl/p5-libwww-perl     5.803    The World-Wide Web
library for Perl
p5-libxml-perl  perl/p5-libxml-perl     0.08     Collection of Perl
modules for working with XML.
p5-log-log4perl perl/p5-log-log4perl    1.00     Log4j implementation for Perl
p5-perl-ldap    perl/p5-perl-ldap       0.33     A client interface to
LDAP servers
p5-perl-tidy    perl/p5-perl-tidy       20031021 Parses and beautifies
perl source
p5-perlio-eol   perl/p5-perlio-eol      0.13     This is a Perl
extension for normalizing line endings (used by svk).
p5-perlio-via-dynamic   perl/p5-perlio-via-dynamic      0.11  This is
a Perl extension for dynamic perlIO layers (used by svk).
p5-perlio-via-symlink   perl/p5-perlio-via-symlink      0.02  This is
a PerlIO layer for creating symlinks (used by svk).
libapreq-perl   www/libapreq-perl       1.1    Perl Libraries for
Apache::Request and Apache::Cookie
mod_perl        www/mod_perl    1.29    Embeds a Perl interpreter in
the Apache 1.3 server
mod_perl2       www/mod_perl2   2.0.1   Embeds a Perl interpreter in
the Apache2 server
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#



Then, I install perl with a command like this:

zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root# port install perl5.8
--->  Fetching perl5.8
--->  Attempting to fetch perl-5.8.7.tar.bz2 from http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/
--->  Verifying checksum(s) for perl5.8
--->  Extracting perl5.8
--->  Applying patches to perl5.8
--->  Configuring perl5.8
--->  Building perl5.8 with target all
--->  Staging perl5.8 into destroot
--->  Packaging tgz archive for perl5.8 5.8.7_0
--->  Installing perl5.8 5.8.7_0
--->  Activating perl5.8 5.8.7_0
--->  Cleaning perl5.8
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#
zmac11:/Users/oracle root#

So, does Linux have anything like this 'port' utility?

I'm aware of rpm but I'm not sure it is all that smart at helping
me install files which I might be dependent on.


-Dan