[Tellico-users] tellico installation not going well

[Thomas Ronayne]

    Hi

    I appreciate your time to respond to my request, but this just doesn't seem
    to be helping. I seem unable to unpack the file at all, although a bunch of
    stuff goes by very fast in the terminal. I also hear my computer doing some
    beeping at times when I attempt this.

    I do not know what all of the required packages would be or how to install
    them. I also would appreciate it if you could perhaps present each terminal
    command one line at a time and if you could let me know what response the
    terminal should give me so I at least know that I am on track.

    I am basically a real newbie to Linux and installing this has been very
    challenging. Perhaps you can provide me with more details as to how I should
    be doing this and what I need before installing Tellico 2.0. Thanks, Shawn
      

OK, no big deal -- let's see if we can figure this out.

The file you download, tellico-2.0.tar.bz2, is a compressed archive of 
all the files that make up Tellico. The archive is a "tar" archive (tar 
is an acronym for "tape archive" that goes back to when back ups where 
done to large reels of 1/2" tape -- you see those being "computers" in 
old movies and television shows) and the way it's compressed is with a 
utility called "bzip."

Now, when you run the command to unzip, "bunzip2 -c tellico-2.0.tar.bz2 
| tar -xvf -" you'll see lots of stuff flying by on the screen (the list 
of files in the archive, exactly what's supposed to happen). The files 
are being extracted from the archive and put into a directory named 
"tellico-2.0" and when the stream stops, if you run "ls" you'll see the 
original file, tellico-2.0.tar.bz2, and the directory created by 
extracting all the files, tellico-2.0.

You run "cd tellico-2.0" (to change directory).

Then you need to prepare the files you extracted; that's done with a 
utility named "configure" with a couple of arguments (options) that tell 
the configure utility how to prepare a file of instructions for another 
utility to do the actual work. The file of instructions is named 
"Makefile" (don't worry about that, it's done automatically). So, the 
next step is the run the configure utility like this: "configure 
--enable-final --disable-debug" and there will be a lot of stuff flying 
by on the screen.

When that finishes (it'll take some time) and if there are no errors 
(like missing required utilities -- see the Tellico web page about 
those) -- the Makefile is created and you're ready to actually build 
Tellico.

That's done with the "make" utility; you simply type "make" on the 
command line, hit the return key and watch still more stuff fly by.

If all goes well, make will finish with no errors and you'll be ready to 
install what you just... uh... made. You do that, and you must do that 
as the super user (root) or you must use the sudo utility (because 
you're going to install Tellico in system directories that you as an 
ordinary user would not have permission to write into). So, let's say 
you're going to use the sudo utility and you would enter "sudo make 
install" to install Tellico.

Now, if any of the above fails it will probably be because of missing 
required utilities (most likely Yaz won't already be there). On the 
Tellico web page there is a list of required utilities and you can click 
on the links there to go to another web page where they can be 
downloaded and then installed exactly the same as described above; i.e., 
unzip - configure - make - make install. One difference would be the way 
an archive is compressed; the ".bz" extension on the Tellico archive 
means "bzip," if the extension is ".gz" it means the archive was 
compressed with "gzip" in which case you unzip with "gunzip -c 
archive-name | tar -xvf -"

Take it slow and you'll probably be all right.

Hope this helps some.