Unpack the source file distribution by issuing the following command:
tar xzf taper-7.0pre-1.tar.gz
Modify Makefile.common as required and then
make clean
make all
Enable this option if you wish to take advantage of taper's new triple buffering system. You must compile your kernel with SYSV_IPC support. If you haven't, can't or don't want to, then you can't use triple buffering. If you don't enable TRIPLE_BUFFER, then your error counts in restore will be invalid.
On slow drives, triple buffering can really improve performance however, on faster drives, can slow down performance. The best thing to do is to compile with triple buffering and look at your performance. If it is slow, then recompile with triple buffering off.
I consider a fast drive to be one that delivers a throughput of more than 8mB/minute.
Taper stores all data to the tape in little endian format. To use taper on a big endian machine, define TAPER_BIG_ENDIAN.
If you are using libc5, and are getting strange errors about "Broken Pipes", segmentation faults etc.., uncomment this option
To place the binaries and the man page in the appropriate locations,
make install
The binaries are placed in /sbin and the man page is /usr/man/cat1 which is in accordance with the Linux FSSTND.
To remove the files
make uninstall
For the hackers, there are a few options at the beginning of defaults.h that you can alter if you wish. They include things such as the environment variable names, internal defaults, and compression program. Don't play around unless you know what you are doing.