Do you know Linux?

[Faustus]

open a gui from the terminal?

[bazooka]

Oh, I thought you were talking about a shell script.

[Garibaldi]

So there is no GUI for RPMs? I'm trying to figure out how to get and install an FTP program (I dispise command line ftp)

And even better yet, I downloaded Firefox, extracted the Firefox-installer folder and have zero clue what to do with it.

I know for Slackware and Debian there is a program called Kpackage that will install RPMs. Since I use Slackware it opens .tgz files by default but it also opens RPMs. I tried installing an app called image2mpeg from source, I cd to the directory and then I did:
./configure
make
make install
but it gave me an error at make:

root@Pavilion:/home/andrew/Programs/image2mpeg# make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
root@Pavilion:/home/andrew/Programs/image2mpeg# make install
make: *** No rule to make target `install'. Stop.
root@Pavilion:/home/andrew/Programs/image2mpeg# make image2mpeg
make: *** No rule to make target `image2mpeg'. Stop.
root@Pavilion:/home/andrew/Programs/image2mpeg# make image2mpeg.tgz
make: *** No rule to make target `image2mpeg.tgz'. Stop.
root@Pavilion:/home/andrew/Programs/image2mpeg# ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/ginstall -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
cat: ../VERSION: No such file or directory
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output... a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of executables...
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ANSI C... none needed
checking for style of include used by make... GNU
checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/ginstall -c
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... (cached) yes
checking for flex... flex
checking for yywrap in -lfl... yes
checking lex output file root... lex.yy
checking whether yytext is a pointer... yes
checking for ranlib... ranlib
checking for main in -lIL... no
root@Pavilion:/home/andrew/Programs/image2mpeg# make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
root@Pavilion:/home/andrew/Programs/image2mpeg# make install
make: *** No rule to make target `install'. Stop.
root@Pavilion:/home/andrew/Programs/image2mpeg#

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Also about installing programs, there is an app for debian called apt-get and a couple for slackware: slapt-get and swaret. all you do at a command line is type:
swaret update (update database)
swaret install [your package name here]
and it will download and install. You can also get your latest package updates by doing:
swaret upgrade
Granted swaret doesn't work on all distros but the syntax is basically the same. As far as firefox, cd to the directory and as root type either firefox or firefox-installer and that should get you started. I'm not sure though.

Another question, where can I find lib files? For instance I downloaded avidemux but when I tried to run it it says that I need libdivxencore.so.0, I checked its site but it didn't have a link for that.

[disturbed1]

Try searching on freshmeat for libfiles.

For slackware, go to slackware.com and navigate to the package browser. You search for the missing lib. Not all libs come in a package named as such. Let's say you need libdv0 it won't be a package called libdv0 but will be provided by another package. Just use the search feature, it will tell you what is included in each package, and what it provides.

No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.

Seems like a broken make file. I'd check out the site, and the read me documentation for that program. Sometimes you need to define certain things like PREFIX=/usr/bin for an install dir. Or make=UNIX_X86, just depends on what the make file and the paticular program is calling for.

[sterno]

There are a lot of GUIs for RPM out there, but most of them are junk. RPM is barely better than junk too, but that's more because of how the packages are set up than because of RPM itself. If you're using an RPM-based system http://rpmfind.net/ is a good spot to look for prebuilt packages.

It looks like the reason you didn't get a working Makefile is that the configure hit an error it considered fatal. It didn't complete, so it didn't give you a complete Makefile. It looks like it can't find libIL, which is part of a graphics library (http://openil.sourceforge.net/).

[Garibaldi]

Try searching on freshmeat for libfiles.

For slackware, go to slackware.com and navigate to the package browser. You search for the missing lib

I tried both of those places, no luck. I will keep looking...

I did get my make problem solved- I just downloaded the src again and ran ./configure again and it was fine.
Thanks,
Garibaldi