Installing gcc

Brian Dessent brian@dessent.net
Tue Jun 20 09:52:00 GMT 2006


Gunnar Sjoo wrote:

> Can anybody tell me how to install gcc? The instructions from gcc.gnu.org are
> absolutely impossible for me to understand. My operative system is Mandrake
> Linux 10.1

The instructions on the gcc web page are for building gcc from source. 
The vast majority of users do not need to do this because their
distribution/OS vendor includes gcc binary packages.  For Mandrake you
should be able to just type something like "urpmi gcc" and be done with
it.  There also might be a GUI package selection tool that you could
use, I don't know.  Regardless, you run whatever it is your distro uses
to install packages and just select the gcc package.

Note that packages are usually modular by language, so if you want more
than just the C compiler you may have to also select e.g. "gcc-c++",
"gcc-java", etc. in addition to the main gcc package.

These steps for installing packages are not listed on the gcc.gnu.org
website (nor could they be) because the details of how to do this varies
with each platform/distro, and there are literally hundreds of distros
out there in the wild.  It would be impossible to cover all of them, and
besides, the gcc project (and/or the FSF) have no control over these
packages, they are created by third parties.

Brian



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