Chapter 1

Introduction

About the Author

As Dwarf, the author began traveling the Information Super highway in the

early 1990's. Several years later he discovered Linux, when someone gave him

a copy of the first edition of The Linux Journal. He purchased a CD from

one of the adds in that magazine, and after only 3 or 4 tries, was successful

installing Slackware on a PC that had previously only run DOS. He was almost

immediately disappointed because many of the source packages that he was

able to download off the net would not build because some library, or utility,

appeared to be missing from the system. Being barely able to manage make

provided none of the skills needed to resolve the problem. As Dwarf later

discovered, the reason for these failures came from the nonstandard locations

for libraries and utilities in a Slackware system. With that knowledge it is

a pretty simple matter to edit the make file so the libraries can be success 

fully found. Lack of this knowledge forced Dwarf to try another distribution.

Software Landing Systems (SLS) was installed next, and it did a much better

job of supplying everything necessary to build packages directly off the net.

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