0 Preface

This book is about porting software between UNIX platforms, the process of taking a soft-ware package in source form and installing it on your machine. This doesn’t sound like a big deal at first, but there’s more to it than meets the eye: you need to know how to get the soft-ware, how to unpack what you get, how to modify the package so that it will compile on your system, how to compile and install the software on your system, and how to deal with prob-lems if they crop up. Nevertheless, it doesn’t inv olve anything that hasn’t already been done to death in hundreds of well-written books: you can find out about getting software from the Internet in The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog, by Ed Krol. Unpacking software is basically a matter of using standard tools described in dozens of good introductory textbooks. Compiling pro-grams is so simple that most C textbooks deal with it in passing. Installation is just a matter of copying software to where you want it. Programming is the meat of lots of books on UNIX programming, for example Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment by Richard Stevens, So why yet another book