I am on Ubuntu 17 at the moment but this applies to all Linux operating systems.
Many times I've ran into applications that are compressed in a tarball for me to install. The first time I ever run into one like that I knew even less than I know now (which is not much). That time I just played around with the files until I was able to execute the program by simply putting ./executable
in the terminal. What I proceeded to do everytime after that to programs in that format was to move the folder to /usr/local/lib
(so that it wouldn't clog my folders) and create a .desktop
in /usr/share/applications
with all the executable and app information.
Today I ran into an app that I had already installed in the previously mentioned way, but their installation procedure was to execute the following
cd program_folder_to_install
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -(options)
How do these two procedures differ? As far as I can tell the way I installed it works just fine.
Are the programs I installed not really installed in my computer?.
I am sure If I look into all the other apps I have installed this way I can find another one whose directions said to install it with cmake
or make
but I just dont know the difference and If I should go back and install them that way.
Thanks for any information regarding this!