by Christian Einfeldt April 30, 2006
How to install Audacity on SuSE? 10.0
If you would like to use Audacity for audio editing in conjunction with your open source film, please go to FossMovieSoftwareAudacity for the details. The directions there are for newbies as well as more experienced Debian users who maybe are a little rusty on installing packages with SuSE?'s RPM system.
I was quite surprised to find that the 5 CD set for SuSE? 10.0 does not come with Audacity, which is one of the most widely used audio editing programs in open source land, as far as I know. I am going to give new users some beginning tips before documenting how I actually installed Audacity. In the event that you already know about YAST and how to get and open RPMs?, you should skip down to the more intermediate section below called "How to open your audacity .rpm file" . Skip the section below called "how to get Audacity on SuSE? 10.0."
How to get Audacity on SuSE? 10.0
Normally, if you use SuSE?, you would get your software (like Audacity) by going to the start button in the lower left hand corner of your SuSE? KDE desktop. You would go to the Control Center, and click on YAST, which stands for "Yet Another Setup Tool." YAST will ask you for your root password. Type it and hit enter. You will get a dialog box with two sides. By default, YAST opens software. Click on "software management" on the right hand side. It will take a second or two for your next dialog box to come up. At the top left hand corner, you will see the word Filter, and Search should be in the box next to the down arrow. If not, click on the down arrow to make sure it is there. Below the word Filter, you will see a white space and the word Search again. Type the word "Audacity" in that white field, but DON'T hit search yet. First, make sure htat the boxes beside Name, Summary, and Description are checked below search. Now click search. You will next get the option to check the box for Audacity, if it is there. I am using SuSE? 10.0, but for some weird reason, I received a message saying "No results". You can install any software you want onto your SuSE? system using this method, IF that software is on those CDs?. In my case, Audacity wasn't there.
Here's what I did to get Audacity. First, I went to packman.org by simply typing packman into my firefox browser. In case you didn't know if Firefox will figure out the extension for you. On the top of the page, near the middle of your window, you will see a white box with the word search written on the white field. Type Audacity into the white field and click on the go button beside the white field. I got a dialog box that says search result, and it gives you a package name, a page description and an update date. The name of the package will be in blue. In this case, the name of the package was audacity. Click on the blue package name. You will then get a larger dialog box describing the software package in greater detail. I am guessing that packman is pretty much oriented to SuSE?, because as it so happens, all of the packages that came up were for SuSE?. You will see a link for the home page for the software, and below that you will see a list of different package versions. The names of the packages are highlighted in blue. As you pass your mouse over the names of the packages, the you will get a pointer finger, indicating that the links are live. Currentl, the first package listed is for SuSE? 10.0 and is labeled i586. I chose that one by default, becaue the only other SuSE? 10.0 package was labeled x86_64, which means a 64 bit package. Since I am not using a 64 bit system, I knew to avoid the x86_64 and go for the i586. This stuff is all pattern recognition, with a bit of memorization thrown in. All of the packages there end in rpm, of course, which is the extension that SuSE? uses, as opposed to .deb for Debian.
Now get ready to download your packages by going to Firefox and making sure that you know what directory Firefox will download into. In Firefox, click on Edit > Preferences > Downloads, and look for the location of your download files. You can change that download option here by clicking on the little down arrow and choosing "other" and then browse to the directory that you want. Click Select and okay.
Back on the Packman site, click on the blue linked name to start your download. After the download is complete, open Konqueror, which is the little blue house on the lower left hand corner of your desktop. Browse to the directory where you just downloaded your binaries, meaning your .rpm package. On the top of the Konqueor menu bar, you will see Tools. Go to Tools > Open Terminal. A shell window will open. In case you didn't know it, this is the command line. Don't freak out if you are using the command line for the first time. Where the cursor is blinking, type su. The command line is case sensitive, so type everything exactly as you see it here. You will be prompted for the password. Type it and hit enter. Now you are a super user, and you can destroy your computer, so be a little bit careful.
Now move to your home directory by typing this command: cd /home and hit enter. Then type ls and hit enter. (That last command is an "l" as in "last", not a one). Typing ls will show everything in the home directory, including your user directory. Now, type cd and the name of your home directory and hit enter. For example, if your home user account was adam for example, you would type cd adam and hit enter. Now you should be in your home user account directory. You should see something like this on your screen: /home/adam # assuming that your user name was adam. The presence of the # sign means you are a super user. That # sign is called a hash. Now that you are in your home user directory, type ls again. You should see the familiar contents of your directory. If you have more than one .rpm file in your directory at this point, I would recommend that you create a new directory. To create the new directory with the command line, type cd .. to take you one level up. Hit enter. Now you should see /home # . Type mkdir audacity and hit enter. Type ls . You should now see the audacity directory. You should now move the audacity .rpm file into your new audacity directory. While making sure that you can still see the audacity .rpm file, type mv audacity- and then hit the tab key, but don't hit the enter key yet. The shell program will finish typing the name of the file for you. Your cursor should now be at the end of the line, and you should see something that looks like this:
/home/adam/audacity # mv audacity-1.3.0_0.1-1.pm.1.i586.rpm
You are not ready yet to hit enter. What you have done so far is to tell the shell that you want to move (mv) the file called audacity-1.3.0_0.1-1.pm.1.i586.rpm somewhere, but you have not yet told it where you want to move it. Now you should tell the shell that you want to move your audacity .rpm file to the audacity directory by typing /home/adam/audacity but don't hit enter yet. Now you should see something that looks like this:
/home/adam/audacity # mv audacity-1.3.0_0.1-1.pm.1.i586.rpm /home/adam/audacity
Now hit enter. Nothing fantastic will happen. Your cursor will just return to its normal position, which should look like this:
/home/adam/audacity #
Now you should change to the audacity directory by typing
cd /home/adam/audacity
and hit enter. Now type the ls command again, and you should see your .rpm file. Now you are ready to open your binary .rpm file.
How to open your audacity. rpm file
You should be in the directory where your audacity .rpm is located. At the # sign, type this command:
rpm -ivh *.rpm
That command is going to open ALL of your rpm files, which will be messy if you didn't move the audacity .rpm file to a separate directory like I recommended. However, if you DID move the audacity .rpm file to a separate audacity directory, you should now see one of two things. Either you will see a bunch of hash marks (####) moving across you screen (which is a good thing) or you will get an error message telling you that something like "failed dependencies" . That message tells you that you need to go back to Packman and get those additional packages upon which Audacity depends. So now you should go back to Firefox, and return to Packman. But before you do anything, write down on a piece of scratch paper the complete name of the file, taking careful note of lower case and upper case letters. Case matters. The name of the missing dependency file will probably be something like libmad.so.0 . Whenever you see something with the letters "lib" in front of it, you should mentally ignore the "lib" when you go to Packman to type in your needed additional dependency package.
So now go back to Packman and in the first search box on the front page, type "mad" just for kicks. The reason that I say "mad" here is that if you mentally ignore the "lib" and just focus on the meat of the name of the package, you will see that it really is "mad". Now you should see a bunch of files, many of which will have "mad" in the name. Choose the name that is closest to the name that you are looking for, or the package description which most closely describes what you want to do with the dependency package you were looking for. Select the name of that package by clicking on the blue package name as you did above in the section entitled "How to get Audacity in SuSE? 10.0." Repeat the steps above to open the package with the command rpm -ivh *.rpm . If you see a bunch of hash marks (####) going across your screen, that is a good thing. It means you have installed Audacity. Now you should be able to run Audacity. Go to your SuSE? start button on your desktop, choose the run command option, and type in Audacity, and Audacity should run. Christian Einfeldt einfel at yahoo dot comdot com.
SuSE? is a good point of departure overall.