Simplifying Linux Installation and Archiving

One of the first issues to deal with is which tools you will use for the task of installation. The answer to this question will depend on what distribution you are using. Here is a sample breakdown of the tools used, in various distributions, for installation:

• SuSE: YaST, rpm
• Ubuntu: Synaptic, apt-get
• Mandriva: Drakinstall, urpmi
• Fedora: Yumex, yum, rpm

Although not a complete listing of applications, you get the idea. The nice thing about how modern Linux distributions are designed is that you don't generally need to know the name of the tool you are using for this purpose. Typically, within the main menu, you will see an entry called Add/Remove Software, or Application Installation (or some variation of either). One universal for all of the above tools (and any Linux installation tool) is you will need either root or sudo permissions to take any action.

Although it might not seem that archiving and programming should go hand in hand but they do. When you've finished that great Linux application you'll need to package up the source for download purposes. What better way to do that than to use open source archival tools such as tar, bzip, and bunzip2? In this series we'll also touch upon some of the graphical archive tools such as:

Fileroller: The gui archive manager for the GNOME desktop.

Ark: KDE's graphical archive manager.

Both of the above packages are as powerful as the command-line equivalents and will help the new Linux user better package their files and directories.

Installing an application in the Linux operating system will often require you to unpack source code before you can get to the installation process. Without a solid understanding of Linux archiving you may not ever get the chance to install that great new product. In this series of articles you will learn everything you need to install and archive packages in the Linux operating system.