Hello Keith, (Oops, send out the previous mail before it was finished.) On Thu, 2010-12-16 at 15:08 +0000, Keith Roberts wrote: > [rpmbuilder at karsites sox]$ rpm -iv ./sox-12.18.1-1.src.rpm > error: cannot write to %sourcedir /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES /usr/src/redhat and sub dirs are owned root.root. If you want to build as a normal user (and you should!) you should fix the ownership of those directories. > Is there a package I need to install and run to set > things up corectly? redhat-rpm-config sets certain build macros. Although not strictly required you should probably always install this packages. One thing I stumbled on is that a new type of check summing is used nowadays for the content of the rpms. If the correct macro isn't set you might run into installation conflicts, f.e. for multilib doc files. > I have created a user called 'rpmbuilder' under my home dir, > and created the rpmbuild dirs under that. If you make a different user to do builds you should rather give it its own home dir. But you can just as well build using your default account. > So what build dir shall I go for? Whatever you prefer. Just using /usr/src/redhat is probably the easiest. If you want to use a different path scheme you can override the default settings in ~/.rpmmacros to suit your needs. For example, I use %_sourcedir %{_topdir}/%{name}-%{version} %_specdir %{_sourcedir} so the source files end up in their own directory and not all in the same SOURCES dir. Regards, Leonard. -- mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research