Sometimes you come across a program you wish the machines in the lab had on them. The lab admins cannot install every program known to man on the machines, so here is a solution to get some programs yourself. The programs selected for demonstration are some simple programs. A game and a small system monitor. These programs do not require any extraordinary libraries, and should be able to run from your home directory. By installing programs in your home directory you will be the only one who can run these programs, but you will be able to run them on every machine.

• 1. Download the compressed file containing the source code
• 2. Unzip the package
• 3. Configure the make file.
• 4. Compile the source code
• 5. Install the Program File

We're going to take you step by step to install a program in your home direcotry. All these commands work with both source codes in the same order, so give 'm both a try. We're going to install a simple system monitor called torsmo. It sits in the corner of your desktop, is very customizable and gives up to date system information.

• 1. First we'll need to download the source archive, the torsmo website is hosted by sourceforge. Download the latest version, at time of writing that is 0.18.

• wget http://puzzle.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/torsmo/torsmo-0.18.tar.gz

• 2. Most source files in a linux environment come with .tar.gz extentions. This is commonly known as a tarball. the .tar extention lets us know that the files are archived using tar. The .gz extention tels us know that the archive is compressed using gzip. You can uncompress and extract the archive with one command.

• tar xvzf torsmo-0.18.tar.gz

• 3. The archive should extract to the torsmo-0.18 directory. You'll need to go into that directory to compile the sources.

• cd torsmo-0.18

• 4. ./configure is a program you will find in many source packages. It is created by the autoconf/automake suite, which creates Makefiles specific to your setup and the flags you set. The most often used flag is --prefix which allows the user to specify in which directory the compiled sources will be installed. In our case we want to install the sources in our home directory. Other flags include flags that allow you to enable or disable certain features in the software. For a complete list of these options run ./configure --help.
  In our case we just want to install the program in our homedirectory and leave all other options as default.

• ./configure --prefix=/home/[username]/

• 5. Now your Makefile is configured it is time to compile your sources, this is simply done by running make, just like when you compile a source using any Makefile.

• make

• 6. If everything went correctly, you should not have any compile errors. If you do, you can either try to debug them yourself, or ask a proctor to help you out. The sources are simply in C and quite simple to read and comprehend. Now we need to install the compiled binary files and man pages for our program. This is simple done by invoking the 'install' parameter of your Makefile. This will install the files in the directory specified in the --prefix flag of your ./configure command.

• make install

• 7. Now all your files are installed we'll need to customize torsmo a little bit. There is a sample config file included with the sources. We'll need to copy that to our home directory, and customize it. The syntax is relatively easy so check it out!.

• cp ~/torsmo-0.18/torsmorc.sample ~/.torsmorc

• 8. Now all is set and done all we need to do is run the program. We'll have to do this from our homedirectory so cd to that and then run the following command.

• bin/torsmo