Trouble with Synaptic

[Donald Metheny]

What you are trying to do is install a program from source. You can't
do that with Synaptic (Synaptic and the apt-get system are supposed to
save you the trouble of doing that). There are a number of
"repositories" around the world, which have stored on them thousands
and thousands of binaries precompiled just for your system.
Synaptic/apt maintains a list of these repostitories, what's on
them, and which programs you have installed. It then automatically
informs you when anything on your system needs updating, and allows
you to search for and install software in one step (via synaptic or
apt-get) search without having to scour the internet.

_If_ you want to install a program from source, here is what you do:
Download the file (as you have already done.)
Open a terminal and change your working directory to your desktop,
thus:
   cd Desktop/

Unzip the archive. In your case you should use:
   tar -xzvf divifund-0.6.2.tar.gz 

This will create a "divifund" folder on your desktop. You can see it
listed if you type:

ls

Switch to this folder:
   cd divifund-0.62/
(Hint: you can just type "cd di", then hit "TAB", and it should
 autocomplete for you.)

Now type "ls" to look at all the files in this folder. You will see
one called "INSTALL." Read it:

cat INSTALL

It tells you how to install it; you should type:
./install.py

I tried to do this on my machine, and it wouldn't install. It
complained about missing dependencies, which were'nt resolved even
when I tried to install them. This is probably why this app wasn't
included in the repositories.

If you want to look for another personal finance manager, synaptic
would come in handy. Open synaptic, click "search", and type in
"finance". A number of programs will be listed. Check the ones you
would like installed, then click "apply".


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On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 11:08:08PM -0400, Donald Metheny wrote:
> Have made repeated attempts to use Synaptic to install a program I
> downloaded to my Desktop. The program is in the form:
> programname.tar.bz. When I do a search in Synaptic it finds the
program
> but places it in the left window and I can do nothing with it. How do
I
> get it to come up in the right window so I can install?
> TIA
>
Thanks everyone for your help and suggestions. Will give them a try as
soon as I can. Thanks again.