CheckInstall Homepage

Recent news Dec 26th, 2009 Checkinstall 1.6.2 has been released with support for the new glibc's at-style functions and many other improvements and bug fixes. This is the first major release in a while. Go download it!. Please read the Changelog and the release notes. Join the mailing list! A lot of people has asked me how can they remove from their boxes a program they compiled and installed from source. Some times -very few- the program's author adds an uninstall rule to their Makefile, but that's not usually the case. This is my primary reason to write CheckInstall. After you ./configure; make your program, CheckInstall will run make install (or whatever you tell it to run) and keep track of every file modified by this installation, using the excelent installwatch utility written by Pancrazio 'Ezio' de Mauro (p@demauro.net). When make install is done, CheckInstall will create a Slackware, RPM or Debian compatible package and install it with Slackware's installpkg, "rpm -i" or Debian's "dpkg -i" as appropriate, so you can view it's contents with pkgtool ("rpm -ql" for RPM users or "dpkg -l" for Debian) or remove it with removepkg ("rpm -e"|"dpkg -r"). Aditionally, this script will leave you a copy of the installed package in the source directory so you can install it wherever you want, which is my second motivation: I don't have to compile the same software again and again every time I need to install it on another box :-).

Go there...
http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/

FAQ

1. I use checkinstall 1.6.1 and the rpm I create report a faild MD5 verification when installed and/or the package has unrelated files inside.

   This is a known bug in version 1.6.1 and will be fixed in the next release. As a workaround you can use the --inspect, --review-spec and/or --review-control command line options and edit out the files to be included in the package.

2. I ran CheckInstall and everything seems to run fine, but when I check my new package I only find the documentation files!

   CheckInstall can't trace (yet) the actions of three kind of binaries:

   • SUID programs
   • SGID programs
   • Statically linked binaries
   
   You may now go to check the binaries you're using in the installation process   ;-).

3. I built my Linux system from scratch (LFS, anyone?) and nothing gets included in the packages I create with CheckInstall!

   Most likely you installed GNU make from source, which by default installs the make binary with SUID and/or SGID permissions. A quick fix:
   
   chmod 0755 `which make`
   
   Which means to remove the SUID and SGID bits from the make binary.
   
   Please refer to the first question in this FAQ for the details.

4. I use Slackware Linux 8.0 and the symbolic links created by my installation do not get into the package!

   The ln binary shipped with Slackware 8.0 is statically linked. Replace it with a dynamically linked one.
   The one shipped with Slackware 7.1 works just fine. You can download it here
   
   Please refer to the first question in this FAQ for the details.
   

5. I used CheckInstall to install the latest XFree86 distribution, but the drivers are being corrupted! If I install XFree86 without CheckInstall everything runs fine. Is this some evil bug?

   It's not a bug. It's your driver's files being stripped by the automatic ELF stripping process. Run checkinstall with the "--strip=no" command line option.

6. I use a RPM based distribution and CheckInstall says it built the rpm package OK but reports an error when installing the .rpm file:

   Building RPM package...OK
Installing RPM package... FAILED!

   And in the install.log file I find something like this:

   error: open of /usr/src/RPM/RPMS/i386/package-1.0-1.i386.rpm failed no such file or directory

   What's wrong?

   There's something wrong with your RPM installation. Check your system and see if the "rpm-build" and "spec-helper" packages are installed. Also verify that their versions match the version of the rpm binary installed in your system.

Go there...
http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/faq.php

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