Insalling a program on FC3

*new to linux, bare w/ me please.*

Distro: FC3

Q: How do i install a program? i usally just get a zipped file that has stuff in it and usally a Makeafile in it. Please help me, im great with windows, but i wana try something new(linux)

Depends on how you get the file. For FC3, since it's based off of Red Hat it uses the RPM format.

Thus if you go to the main FC3 site or just on google and look for RPM builds of the program you want you can install it by using a simple command in a shell or use a GUI program. I havn't used FC3 myself so you'll have to look up how to run the rpm program on it.

The way that SuSe used it was:
rpm -i rpmname.rpm

Where rpm stands for install I believe.

Or if you want to compile it. After downloading the source code for the program you want it's usually a matter of:

./configure
make
make install

Although I would read the README's that come with the source code they usually have instructions for them.

Good luck.

FC3 default installs firefox, so if your using that to navigate and you download an rpm for the FC3 distro (its pretty standard, at least that i've found, that theres a pre-compiled rpm for you) then you can simply choose to open the file with the system installer and your all good. it downloads the file to a tmp folder, prompts you for the root pw, then goes ahead with the install. but yea, like he ^ said, your going to want an rpm..

if you wanted to manually install it, then save it to a location and then what I type is:

although you'll probably want to login as root first to install it as your going to need to do so 99.9% of the time:
it wont show in the terminal that your typing the password, but you are.

and then if you do download a file that you need to compile, then usually the process would be more like:
./configure
make
su
<password>
make install

because the file will probably need to install something to a directory that your user accounts doesn't have permissions for.
hope this helps