[NTLUG:Discuss] Installing Spamassassin on Suse

[Kipton Moravec]

I am a new user, just got Suse installed last Saturday.  The main reason for 
switching to Linux was to help knock down my email Spam.

I tried Ubuntu, then Debian which I brought to the Install. When we could not 
get X-windows to start, I was given Suse to load which did load.

According to the KMAIL instructions:

"16.10.3.1 Preperations
The actual software needs to be present before spam messages can be filtered. 
Run YaST as user root and install the package spamassassin with the package 
manager ('Software'->'Software').

Then configure the system to activate the SpamAssassin service on start-up by 
opening the RunLevel editor in YaST (located under 'System'). Search the list 
of services for spamd and select activate. Confirm the choice with Finish. 
This completes the SpamAssassin installation process."

It sounded easy enough. 

However when I opened YaST it said it was YaST2 and under Software was 
"Install and Remove Software" not ('Software'->'Software') as the 
documentation said.  Searching for spamassassin or just spam yielded "No 
Results"  

Maybe I needed to point to a network server. So under "change source of 
installation" I tried to put in the address of a Suse mirror.  Searching 
around on the web I found a server in Grapevine, TX
ftp://ftp.empiricalnetworks.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1

gave an error: ERROR(InstSrc:E_no_instsrc_on_media)

It looks like Yast does not work as the instructions say. Ir the instructions 
are wrong or incomplete. Which really sucks.

So the next stop was http://spamassassin.apache.org
they had tar.gz format, tar.bz2 format, and zip format.  Somewhere i read 
there was a problem installing these format with packages because of 
dependencies. 

Of course the packages listed on the page were for Debian users, and Gentoo 
users.  So there was an install using CPAN which i decided to give a shot 
because it said I had Perl installed.

After some guessing, it started downloading all sorts of stuff. Then it 
crashed because it could not find makefile.  Searching on the disk I could 
not find makefile or gcc.  What kind of distribution does not supply a c 
compiler or make? 

Looking at the installed packages under Development -> Languages -> C and C++ 
it says only "cpp The GCC Preprocessor" nothing about gcc.
So I opened up a root terminal window and tried gcc it returned "command not 
found" same with make and makefile.

It is not like I did not try, but I do not know if it is this distribution or 
if Linux in general has a problem with poor documentation, but I can't figure 
out how to get Spamassassin installed, and do not know how to get a c 
compiler to work.