Image courtesy of: polaroidmemories
This will be fairly obvious to many but bear in mind, that lots of different types of people are going to be playing with the Raspberry Pi going forward. Also bear in mind that I haven’t had to worry about compiling software for arm based systems before so some some follow on posts could get interesting….. Besides I need this post to link to later on.
Assuming you are using Debian but also applicable to other Linux distributions you can install most of the software you need via managed packages.
Many examples you may come across for installing software for the Raspberry pi will have a command line that starts with:
sudo apt-get install
apt-get is the package manager used by Debian. The good news is that this will usually just work automagically, dependencies will be handled for you, and you may just have to confirm that you are happy with the extra storage space that will be taken on your SD card.
On the other hand you have compile
Some software you may want to install will not be available as a package, the instructions you find may involve downloading a source code archive, unpacking it and running:
./configure
make
make install
You can find out more here about what these commands actually do if you are interested.
If this works on the Raspberry Pi then be prepared to wait a while, this is one of those places where the processor on your PC will run much faster and you could be in for a very long wait during the make stage (perhaps even measured in hours) whilst cryptic messages stream up your screen. Unfortunately there is a good chance it won’t work and fail with an error message that probably has the word “arm” in it. If you are lucky you may find something online that is specific to the Raspberry Pi that will provide some modifications to make before you compile the software.
In summary
There are a huge amount of software goodies that should just work just waiting for you to access via a package manager. If you have to compile software (assuming you didn’t write it or other wise know what you are doing) then it is best to try to find some Raspberry Pi specific instructions. To the best of my knowledge the most likely issue is that Debian is default to assuming arm4 architecture in an attempt to be as inclusive as possible, whereas the software may have a dependency on an higher version which is actually supported on the Raspberry armv6.