What is configure in linux

Quick Answer: What does configure do in Linux?

configure is a script that is generally provided with the source of most standardized type Linux packages and contains code that will “patch” and localize the source distribution so that it will compile and load on your local Linux system.

What is configuration in Linux?

A “configuration file” is a local file used to control the operation of a program; it must be static and cannot be an executable binary. It is recommended that files be stored in subdirectories of /etc rather than directly in /etc .

What is configure command?

configure is normally a (generated) shell script which is packaged in Unix-based applications and is used to detect certain machine settings and set up needed files for make to do its job. Look for a configure. bat or a file called configure in the QT directory and run it.

What is configure make and make install?

./configure runs a script named “configure” in the current directory. make runs the program “make” in your path, and make install runs it again with the argument “install”. Generally, the “configure” script was generated by a collection of programs known as “autotools”.

What is make config?

make menuconfig is one of five similar tools that can configure Linux source, a necessary early step needed to compile the source code. make menuconfig , with a menu-driven user interface, allows the user to choose the features of Linux (and other options) that will be compiled.

How do I configure Linux?

The ‘configure’ command is NOT a standard Linux/UNIX command. configure is a script that is generally provided with the source of most standardized type Linux packages and contains code that will “patch” and localize the source distribution so that it will compile and load on your local Linux system.

Where is .config in Linux?

Guide to linux configuration files

• Global config files. Apply to all users. Usually located in /etc.
• Local config files. Applies to a specific user. Stored in the users home dir, as

/.config/example. AKA dot files.

What is sudo make install?

By definition, if you are doing make install that means you are making a local install, and if you need to do sudo make install that means you don’t have permission to wherever you are writing.

How do you write a script setup?

1. Write sources. Create an empty directory called tut_prog and enter in it. …
2. Run Autoconf. Write the following in a file named configure.ac: …
3. Run Automake. Write the following in a file named Makefile.am: …
4. Build project. Run now the new configure script: ./configure. …
5. Clean project. …
6. Generate project.

How do you set Cflags in settings?

What is the correct syntax to add CFLAGS and LDFLAGS to “configure”?

1. Untar the source tarball to a freshly created directory.
2. Issue the command ./configure CFLAGS=”-I/usr/local/include” LDFLAGS=”-L/usr/local/lib”
3. Issue the command make.
4. Issue the command make install.

How make install works?

When you do “make install”, the make program takes the binaries from the previous step and copies them into some appropriate locations so that they can be accessed. Unlike on Windows, installation just requires copying some libraries and executables and there is no registry requirement as such.

How do I run Windows Setup?

The Run window offers one of the fastest ways to open the System Configuration tool. Simultaneously press the Windows + R keys on your keyboard to launch it, type “msconfig”, and then press Enter or click/tap on OK. The System Configuration tool should open immediately.

How do I compile Makefile am?

Makefile.am files are compiled to Makefiles using automake. in the directory, which should create the configure script (you will need to have the Autotools suite installed to run this). After that, you should have a configure script that you can run.

What is Defconfig in Linux?

The platform’s defconfig contains all of the Linux kconfig settings required to properly configure the kernel build (features, default system parameters, etc) for that platform. Defconfig files are typically stored in the kernel tree at arch/*/configs/ .

How do I change kernel config?

To configure the kernel, change to /usr/src/linux and enter the command make config. Choose the features you want supported by the kernel. Usually, There are two or three options: y, n, or m. m means that this device will not be compiled directly into the kernel, but loaded as a module.

Where is kernel config file?

The Linux kernel configuration is usually found in the kernel source in the file: /usr/src/linux/. config .

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The magic behind configure, make, make install

If you’ve used any flavour of Unix for development, you’ve probably installed software from source with this magic incantation:

I know I’ve typed it a lot, but in my early days using Linux I didn’t really understand what it meant, I just knew that if I wanted to install software this was the spell to recite.

Recently I’ve been building my own Unix tools, and I wanted to tap into this standard install process; not only is it familiar to many Unix users, it’s also a great starting point for building a package for Homebrew and the various Linux and BSD package managers. It was time to dig into the Unix Grimoire and find out what the incantation does.

What does all of this do

There are three distinct steps in this process:

Configure the software

The configure script is responsible for getting ready to build the software on your specific system. It makes sure all of the dependencies for the rest of the build and install process are available, and finds out whatever it needs to know to use those dependencies.

Unix programs are often written in C, so we’ll usually need a C compiler to build them. In these cases the configure script will establish that your system does indeed have a C compiler, and find out what it’s called and where to find it.

Build the software

Once configure has done its job, we can invoke make to build the software. This runs a series of tasks defined in a Makefile to build the finished program from its source code.

The tarball you download usually doesn’t include a finished Makefile . Instead it comes with a template called Makefile.in and the configure script produces a customised Makefile specific to your system.

Install the software

Now that the software is built and ready to run, the files can be copied to their final destinations. The make install command will copy the built program, and its libraries and documentation, to the correct locations.

This usually means that the program’s binary will be copied to a directory on your PATH , the program’s manual page will be copied to a directory on your MANPATH , and any other files it depends on will be safely stored in the appropriate place.

Since the install step is also defined in the Makefile , where the software is installed can change based on options passed to the configure script, or things the configure script discovered about your system.

Depending on where the software is being installed, you might need escalated permissions for this step so you can copy files to system directories. Using sudo will often do the trick.

Where do these scripts come from

All of this works because a configure script examines your system, and uses the information it finds to convert a Makefile.in template into a Makefile , but where do the configure script and the Makefile.in template come from?

If you’ve ever opened up a configure script, or associated Makefile.in , you will have seen that they are thousands of lines of dense shell script. Sometimes these supporting scripts are longer than the source code of the program they install.

Even starting from an existing configure script, it would be very daunting to manually construct one. Don’t worry, though: these scripts aren’t built by hand.

Programs that are built in this way have usually been packaged using a suite of programs collectively referred to as . This suite includes autoconf , automake , and many other programs, all of which work together to make the life of a software maintainer significantly easier. The end user doesn’t see these tools, but they take the pain out of setting up an install process that will run consistently on many different flavours of Unix.

Hello world

Let’s take a simple “Hello world” C program, and see what it would take to package it with autotools.

Here’s the source of the program, in a file called main.c :

Creating the configure script

Instead of writing the configure script by hand, we need to create a configure.ac file written in m4sh—a combination of m4 macros and POSIX shell script—to describe what the configure script needs to do.

The first m4 macro we need to call is AC_INIT , which will initialise autoconf and set up some basic information about the program we’re packaging. The program is called helloworld , the version is 0.1 , and the maintainer is george@thoughtbot.com :

We’re going to use automake for this project, so we need to initialise that with the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE macro:

Next, we need to tell autoconf about the dependencies our configure script needs to look for. In this case, the configure script only needs to look for a C compiler. We can set this up using the AC_PROG_CC macro:

If there were other dependencies, then we’d use other m4 macros here to discover them; for example the AC_PATH_PROG macro looks for a given program on the user’s PATH .

Now that we’ve listed our dependencies, we can use them. We saw earlier that a typical configure script will use the information it has about the user’s system to build a Makefile from a Makefile.in template.

The next line used the AC_CONFIG_FILES macro to tell autoconf that the configure script should do just that: it should find a file called Makefile.in , substitute placeholders like @PACKAGE_VERSION@ with values like 0.1 , and write the results to Makefile .

Finally, having told autoconf everything our configure script needs to do, we can call the AC_OUTPUT macro to output the script:

Here’s the whole thing. Not bad, compared to the 4,737 line configure script it’s going to produce!

We’re almost ready to package up and distribute our program, but we’re still missing something. Our configure script will expect a Makefile.in file that it can substitute all of those system-specific variables into, but so far, we’ve not created that file.

Creating the Makefile

As with the configure script, the Makefile.in template is very long and complex. So instead of writing it by hand, we write a shorter Makefile.am file, which automake will use to generated the Makefile.in for us.

First, we need to set some options to tell automake about the layout of the project. Since we’re not following the standard layout of a GNU project, we warn automake that this is a foreign project:

Next, we tell automake that we want the Makefile to build a program called helloworld :

There’s a lot of information packed into this line, thanks to automake’s uniform naming scheme.

The PROGRAMS suffix is called a . It tells automake what properties the helloworld file has. For example, PROGRAMS need to be built, whereas SCRIPTS and DATA files don’t need to be built.

The bin prefix tells automake that the file listed here should be installed to the directory defined by the variable bindir . There are various directories defined for us by autotools—including bindir , libdir , and pkglibdir —but we can also define our own.

If we wanted to install some Ruby scripts as part of our program, we could define a rubydir variable and tell automake to install our Ruby files there:

Additional prefixes can be added before the install directory to further nuance automake’s behaviour.

Since we’ve defined a PROGRAM , we need to tell automake where to find its source files. In this case, the prefix is the name of the program these source files build, rather than the place where they will be installed:

Here’s the whole Makefile.am file for our helloworld program. As with the configure.ac and the configure script, it’s a lot shorter than the Makefile.in that it generates:

Putting it all together

Now we’ve written our config files, we can run autotools and generate the finished configure script and Makefile.in template.

First, we need to generate an m4 environment for autotools to use:

Now we can run autoconf to turn our configure.ac into a configure script, and automake to turn our Makefile.am into a Makefile.in :

Distributing the program

The end user doesn’t need to see our autotools setup, so we can distribute the configure script and Makefile.in without all of the files we used to generate them.

Fortunately, autotools will help us with distribution too. The Makefile contains all kinds of interesting targets, including one to build a tarball of the project containing all of the files we need to distribute:

You can even test that the distribution tarball can be installed under a variety of conditions:

Overview

Now we know where this incantation comes from and how it works!

On the maintainer’s system:

On the end-user’s system:

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What is configure in Linux?

configure is a script that is generally provided with the source of most standardized type Linux packages and contains code that will “patch” and localize the source distribution so that it will compile and load on your local Linux system.

What is configuration in Linux?

A “configuration file” is a local file used to control the operation of a program; it must be static and cannot be an executable binary. It is recommended that files be stored in subdirectories of /etc rather than directly in /etc .

What is configure command?

configure is normally a (generated) shell script which is packaged in Unix-based applications and is used to detect certain machine settings and set up needed files for make to do its job. Look for a configure. bat or a file called configure in the QT directory and run it.

What is configure make and make install?

./configure runs a script named “configure” in the current directory. make runs the program “make” in your path, and make install runs it again with the argument “install”. Generally, the “configure” script was generated by a collection of programs known as “autotools”.

Where are configuration files in Linux?

Linux treats each device as a special file. All such files are located in /dev . /etc – Contains most system configuration files and the initialisation scripts in /etc/rc.

How can I get configuration of Linux?

To know the basic information about your system, you need to be familiar with the command-line utility called uname-short for unix name.

1. The uname Command. …
2. Get the Linux Kernel Name. …
3. Get the Linux Kernel Release. …
4. Get the Linux Kernel Version. …
5. Get Network Node Hostname. …
6. Get Machine Hardware Architecture (i386, x86_64, etc.)

How do I enable Internet on Linux?

How to Connect to the Internet Using the Linux Command Line

1. Find the Wireless Network Interface.
2. Turn On the Wireless Interface.
3. Scan for Wireless Access Points.
4. WPA Supplicant Config File.
5. Find the Name of the Wireless Driver.
6. Connect to the Internet.

What’s configure?

to design or adapt to form a specific configuration or for some specific purpose: The planes are being configured to hold more passengers in each row. Computers. … to set up (a software program or device) for a particular computer, computer system, or task: to configure the printer for a wireless network.

What is sudo make install?

By definition, if you are doing make install that means you are making a local install, and if you need to do sudo make install that means you don’t have permission to wherever you are writing.

How do I set up settings?

1. Write sources. Create an empty directory called tut_prog and enter in it. …
2. Run Autoconf. Write the following in a file named configure.ac: …
3. Run Automake. Write the following in a file named Makefile.am: …
4. Build project. Run now the new configure script: ./configure. …
5. Clean project. …
6. Generate project.

How make install works?

When you do “make install”, the make program takes the binaries from the previous step and copies them into some appropriate locations so that they can be accessed. Unlike on Windows, installation just requires copying some libraries and executables and there is no registry requirement as such.

How do I run Windows Setup?

The Run window offers one of the fastest ways to open the System Configuration tool. Simultaneously press the Windows + R keys on your keyboard to launch it, type “msconfig”, and then press Enter or click/tap on OK. The System Configuration tool should open immediately.

How do I compile Makefile am?

Makefile.am files are compiled to Makefiles using automake. in the directory, which should create the configure script (you will need to have the Autotools suite installed to run this). After that, you should have a configure script that you can run.

What are the log files in Linux?

Some of the most important Linux system logs include:

• /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages store all global system activity data, including startup messages. …
• /var/log/auth. …
• /var/log/kern. …
• /var/log/cron stores information about scheduled tasks (cron jobs).

How do I use Linux?

1. pwd — When you first open the terminal, you are in the home directory of your user. …
2. ls — Use the “ls” command to know what files are in the directory you are in. …
3. cd — Use the “cd” command to go to a directory. …
4. mkdir & rmdir — Use the mkdir command when you need to create a folder or a directory.

What are different shells in Linux?

What are the different Shells?

• The Bourne Shell. The Bourne shell (sh), written by Steve Bourne at AT&T Bell Labs, is the original UNIX shell. …
• The C Shell. The C shell (csh): …
• The Korn Shell. The Korn shell (ksh): …
• The GNU Bourne-Again Shell. The GNU Bourne-Again shell (bash):

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