NEVER log into your computer as root!

In general, you don't want to give programs permission to do more than they need to do, because there are a lot of things you don't want to do, whether it's by mistake or because an attacker is trying to take over your system. Other accounts on your computer (even administrator accounts) have limits on what they can do, but root can do anything.

Here's a good rundown of why you shouldn't log in as root. Since it doesn't sound like you're running Ubuntu (because root is disabled by default there), some of the particular advice given there won't apply, but the main thing to get out of that article is that programs that don't need to run as root (like AFNI, or your web browser) shouldn't, and programs that do need to run as root (like installers, if you're installing something for all users) can be run from an administrator account using "sudo", which is available on all UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X systems. (There's almost certainly an equivalent on Windows, too, I'm just not sure it's called "sudo".)

Now to business. The GSL site doesn't provide a lot of useful installation information-- the GNU people expect you to be ready to compile and install the library yourself, which is a pain to do by hand even if you know how. The easiest way to install software on Linux these days is usually the package manager, which might be yum or apt-get (or something else) depending on the flavor of Linux you have. Log out of your system, log back in as a normal user, and type this into the terminal:

which yum apt-get

The terminal should print out one line telling you which package manager is installed.

If it says

/usr/bin/yum

you should run

yum install gsl.x86_64

or if it says

/usr/bin/apt-get

you should run

apt-get libgsl0ldbl

(If it says neither, you are using a less common Linux distribution and how did you get yourself into this mess?)

At this point it might die saying it doesn't have permission, in which case you should retry the command with "sudo" tacked onto the front, as in

sudo yum install gsl.x86_64

which will ask you for your password and then run just that command as root. This might say something like "[your user] is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.". If it does, you can log into your administrator account with

su [your administrator account name here]

(not root!) which will prompt your for the administrator account's password. Then you enter the sudo command, enter the administrator password, and finally when it's done use

logout

to get back to your user account.

HTH,
Isaac



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/28/2014 08:46PM by Isaac Schwabacher.