How do i compile a program?

[MelonRider]

I’m new to Linux, and EOS is my first distro. I learned some installation methods for programs, but now i downloaded a linux client for a game but there is no tar.gz file or executable. I made a google search about it and i think i need to compile it or something. I found a tutorial but when i tried to do a ./configure command (wich in the tutorial it says it’s the standard installation process), it says the command doesn’t exist. Would love to get some easy to understand help, getting a little frustrated here.

[egrath]

Endless OS is a little different in the aspect of installing new software. If a application is not in the App Store, you need to build a Flatpak by yourself.

To build a Flatpak, one must already know how to build a application the old-fashioned way. To start experimenting around, i recommend you to run the commands for building inside a Toolbox container:

toolbox create
toolbox enter

Inside this container, you now have all the tools from a regular Fedora Linux installation available. As you wish to build applications, you also have to install the required packages for doing so:

sudo dnf -y group install "Development Tools"
sudo dnf -y group install "C Development Tools and Libraries"

Now you are able to build (basic) applications using autotools (“configure”).

Example

In this example we build the “Galculator” a simple replacement for the GNOME Calculator. I assume that you are already in the toolbox.

Fetch and extract the sources:

wget http://galculator.mnim.org/downloads/galculator-2.1.4.tar.gz
gzip -dc galculator-2.1.4.tar.gz | tar -xvf -

Build:

cd galculator-2.1.4
./configure

This will yield a error for a missing dependency (intltool). We install it and try again:

sudo dnf -y install intltool
./configure

This will yield another error, this time about missing GTK 3.0 Development libraries. Install it and try again:

sudo dnf -y install gtk3-devel
./configure

This time, the configuration process succeeds. Configuration means that the Makefiles have been generated in accordance to your system environment. Often the above process can be simplified if the developer provides some kind of documentation which dependencies are needed (often in a file called INSTALL), but for galculator the author didn’t provided one, so we were on our own.

To actually build and install it, run:

make
sudo make install

When everything finishes, you can run it:

galculator