Section: Download
Subsection: Which Package?
Last revision: April 26, 2006
G-Cows can be downloaded in different formats:
Programs are written in a human readable form (source) and then translated in a machine readable form (compiled). The packages contain the already compiled executables (for Fedora Core Linux, Suse Linux and FreeBSD respectively) while the source tarball contains the original sources and must be compiled.
Packages contains the already compiled executables. They can be easily installed on Fedora Core 4, Fedora Core 5, SUSE Linux 10.0 and FreeBSD. For other distributions/systems you have to download the source tarball and compile G-Cows on your own (RPM packages could possibly work on other Linux distributions which use this standard like Red Hat and Mandriva)
Packages must be installed as root so if you can't do that, you must use the source tarball, which gives you a higher control on installation and allow an installation without root privileges.
The source tarball contains all the source files needed to compile G-Cows on your machine. You only need to download the file and follow the installation instructions reported in the download page. However, in order to compile G-Cows you need some development tool installed on your system:
If you don't have these development tools installed on your system (and you don't want to install them) you'll probably prefer the compiled RPM package.