I am new to Linux (new as in installed it yesterday), I need it for my programming course in the university and I've been told to install specific versions of specific programs, but though I've used apt-get install to install them (having previously done apt-get update) they aren't in the correct version.
The programs that I need are make 4.0 and valgrind 3.10.1.
apt-get installs make 3.81 and valgrind 3.10.0.SVN.
I have tried typing "apt-get install make4.0" and "apt-get install valgrind10.3.1" to no avail. I have downloaded them from the internet and followed what instructions I could understand to install the newer versions but it keeps saying that I have the older ones. (I'm not sure if I can post direct links here, if I can let me know and I'll post where I got them from).
What have I been doing wrong? How can I fix this?
I am currently running Linux Mint.
Thanks for any answer in advance.
1 Answer
Due to a long-standing unresolved Debian bug report, GNU Make remained the age-old 3.81 in Debian for a very long time, and as a consequence, in Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu and Mint.
The latest Debian release, Jessie, has upgraded to 4.0, so Debian-based distributions will have that upgrade. However, it is better to use 4.1.
This has been discussed many times on the GNU Make mailing list and elsewhere.
So to get a newer version, you must compile it from scratch. This is easy:
- Install the required packages (
gcc,makeand such). - Open up a shell (if you're using the GUI, a terminal window).
Type the following commands (or something equivalent, e.g. you can use
curlinstead ofwget):cd /tmp wget tar xvf make-4.1.tar.gz cd make-4.1/ ./configure make sudo make install cd .. rm -rf make-4.1.tar.gz make-4.1
Now, make 4.1 is in /usr/local/bin/make.
You can verify it is there with whereis make.
You can make it your default make by prefixing /usr/local/bin to your $PATH variable in your shell startup file; for instance, in .profile or .bashrc if you use the bash shell.
Don't try to install a self-compiled make (or anything else that doesn't come from the distribution's package manager) into /bin or /usr/bin; doing that will confuse your package manager.
