Excellent. This gives a nice range of options. I tried mock - the first build failed so I tried a different src rpm and it worked. Installed fine. I now have gnome-commander on xfce4/centos7. Many thanks. Lots to do now..... Stan Sent from my iPhone > On Dec 4, 2014, at 4:42 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 4:16 PM, Stan Cruise <stancruise at me.com> wrote: >> This question may not belong in the Centos.org list, but I do want to >> compile against this distro. Please advise. >> >> >> The question: >> >> Can I be pointed at methods to learn to compile source against a distro. I >> have software development background (but too long ago to be specifically >> useful; however I have the concepts). Typically I can find some fairly >> decent step-by-steps for some apps, but it never works out. Which means I am >> missing the basics. >> >> I have been working with Centos and Fedora through many VM and metal >> installs, so that part is OK. I am getting tired of constantly trying to >> find the app I want in the distro, or an applicable rpm. It's time to >> compile. > > The best approach depends very much on the target application and how > you intend to mange it. Most sources will have a generic configure > script and makefile that will build and maybe install in /usr/local. > For a quick test, that might be enough, but you have to note where > things land and clean up after yourself. > > Note that 'most' things worth building have already been packaged as > RPMs, so finding them is still going to be your easiest solution. If > they are for a 'slightly' wrong disto, you can often grab the source > rpm instead of the binary and 'rpmbuild --rebuild ...' to get locally > configured binary rpms. The somewhat higher level approach to this > is to install the 'mock' package from epel and then 'mock -r > some_version --rebuild some_src.rpm'. This will download all of > the required library support and build the binary rpm for some > fedora/centos other than the running system. There are lots of > variations, but these may get something working without a lot of > specific programming knowledge. > > One other thing to know about would be 'software collections' that > have updated versions of applications that can co-exist with the stock > versions. This might come into play if you run across source that > uses c++11 and you want to compile it on Centos 6 (thus needing a > newer gcc, etc.). > > > -- > Les Mikesell > lesmikesell at gmail.com > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos