Newbie Install Question

[Rich Rudnick]

On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 13:42 -0600, Tab Gilbert wrote:
> If I spoke the "language" I am sure could articulate myself better. 
> No, I do not enjoy this but  expected a certain amount of "learning"
> to occur.  I just thought it would be a little more user friendly. 
> Installing a simple program should not be so major and I am surpised
> there is not a real step-by-step instruction list that I can find.  If
> I could ever figure this stuff out I would be glad to post it on the
> Ubuntu site cause this is just a normal problem for a newbie.
> 

What you're trying to do is never really going to be a 'newbie friendly'
operation. Compiling programs (the configure, make, sudo make install
process James Grey described) is not something that is going to be
amenable to 'step by step' instructions, since each program has it's own
dependencies, quirks, bugs, documentation errors, etc, etc, and each of
these things will change how the program gets compiled. That's what a
linux distribution does for you -- the maintainers figure out how the
program needs to be compiled so you don't have to :)

You might be better off describing just what you want the program to do
for you; maybe someone can recommend one already in ubuntu that will do
the job.