Checkinstall: A safe way to try out cutting edge Linux software.
Linux as a desktop operating system is finally at place where it can be
comfortable alternative to Windows or Mac OS X for a lot of people.
Linux has outgrown the perception that it’s necessary to use the command line
or have to compile your own software.
Yet, the hacker culture it has evolved from is ripe with opportunities for
additional efficiency and power for those users that do dare to visit the
command line.
Even if you don’t use the command line for any other reason, checkinstall is
one Linux utility worth checking out.
It provides an easy “undo” option when trying out software that is being
installed from source code.
With Mandriva Linux, this should already be a rare need. They have formal
releases of their software collection once a year, and specific packages are
continually updated throughout the year.
Yet, sometimes your favorite program will have some great bug fix or feature
update available that has not put into an official Mandriva RPM package for
easy point-and-click installation.
With Linux, you have the opportunity to be daring and try installing the newer
version from source code. There is a risk that the new version won’t work for
some reason, and it would be desirable to undo it.
The trouble is, manual installations often litter the hard disk with files in
several locations that are hard to track down and remove. This is where
‘checkinstall’ comes in. It captures the final installation step of a manual install,
and creates a standard Mandriva rpm. From there I can install and uninstall
using the standard graphical tools.
In my case, I wanted to install a new version of the mutt e-mail program, and Mandriva did not have
an official package ready yet.
I downloaded the mutt source code and double-clicked to open it with ‘ark’,
which allowed me to easily unpack the compressed file into a ’src’ directory I
have. From there I could open and read the ‘INSTALL’ file and review the
installation instructions. It followed the typical pattern:
./configure make make install
By reading the documentation, I found a couple of options I wanted to add, and
then went through these steps on the command line:
$ cd src/mutt-1.5.9 $ ./configure --enable-imap --with-ssl $ make $ checkinstall --install=yes
Now my new version of mutt was installed, with the added flexibility that I
could easily uninstall it with Mandriva’s standard tools if it didn’t work out
for some reason.
There are any number things that can wrong when attempting to install software
from source code. ‘checkinstall’ isn’t a silver bullet to make source code
compile properly for you, but it is an excellent tool to help keep manual software
installations organized and manageable.
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