Absolutely clueless linux samba user [off topic]

[Chris Watt]

At 01:19 AM 10/17/00 -0400, kevin brown wrote:
>OK, so installed suse linux 6.4 and have a neat kde desktop. Now I have a
>smba cd from oreilly book publishing. If it was windows I pop the cd in,
>installshield starts, i reboot then, whammy, i have samba. Now I have to rpm
>or tar something..???

Actually the problem is that you seem to have confused three different
potential methods of installing something. I don't know if Susu uses the
Redhat Package Manager (aka "RPM" a useful system for
installing/un-installing/upgrading programs very easily and cleanly. . .
Included in Redhat Linux of course but also many other distributions), but
either way you could install Samba by downloading the latest source, if you
got it on a cd with a book this probably means the version you have is
fairly seriously outdated due to publishing/shipping delays, the latest
Samba version is 2.0.7 and you can grab it from one of the samba.org ftp
sites (or mirror thereof).

Assuming you're installing from source code what you should do is:

1. Download the source code (called samba-[something].tar.gz). This is a
tar'd (short for "Tape archived" basically means "contatenated") file which
has been compressed with gzip, so you:

2. Decompress the archive by running "gunzip samba*.gz"

3. Extract the actual source files "tar -xvf samba-comething.tar"

4. cd into the directory that tar created (probably just like the filename
but without the ".tar" extension) and run the configure script. At this
point you should already have decompressed the source docs which will be in
the same directory (or a sub-dir called "doc" or "docs" or some such
obvious name) so you can read the detailed installation instructions from
that point on (basically it will involve running a configure script to
prepare the source files for your particular system and then compiling the
actual program and copying the files into apropriate locations on your
system).

IF Suse has a copy of RPM on it you have the (much easier) option of
installing Samba from a pre-built RPM file (so grab the latest
samba-whatever.rpm from a samba.org ftp site or mirror thereof) and then
run the command "rpm -Uvh samba*.rpm" and it's installed. It may also have
some other package manager you might want to use, but RPM is the only one I
can help with. Since your problem is more of an Suse problem than a Samba
problem, you could probably get a better answer on a Suse mailing list.

Am willing to come to your office and show you if 1) you're in Nova Scotia
or 2) You'll cover my travel expenses ;-)
--

Who is this General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?