How does software installation in Linux work?

Posted by Saif Bechan on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Saif Bechan
Published on 2010-03-31T03:17:15Z Indexed on 2010/03/31 5:33 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 791

Filed under:

linux

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installation

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tutorial

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beginner

I am new to Linux and trying to set up a server. For this project I need some additional software, but how to install the software I'm interested in is not always obvious.

For example, this was my experience with a PHP package called htscanner:

There is no installation guide on the website.
The website says that the version I used did not have any dependencies, but this is incorrect. "Release 0.8.1: No dependencies registered."
There is no configuration guide on the website. After I managed to get it installed it still didn't work. I decided to just uninstall it and find a better solution.
Uninstalling isn't straightforward; the best answer I got is to manually look for the files and delete them.

What are the basic concepts of installing and uninstalling software on Linux? How is this supposed to work?

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