Installing

If you downloaded a binary version of 4Pane

Debian-type systems
If you already used apt-get or equivalent (see Getting 4Pane) 4Pane should already have been installed. If so you can proceed directly to Running 4Pane.

If instead you downloaded a 4Pane .deb, you can install it with dpkg. First install any dependencies (see Installing wxWidgets). Then open a terminal in the directory containing the .deb.
Get superuser privileges with sudo or su, and do something like:

sudo dpkg -i ./4pane_0.6.0-1_i386.deb

(using the correct filename, of course!)

Other systems
Your distro might have a semi-intelligent way to install a binary package e.g. YAST in SuSE. If so, use it to install first wxWidgets, then your 4Pane package.

Otherwise first install any dependencies (see Installing wxWidgets). Then do whatever is appropriate for your distro: for example, in a system that uses rpms, you would open a shell with superuser privileges to the directory where you downloaded 4Pane, then do something like:

rpm -Uvh ./4Pane-0.6.0-1.i586.rpm

(using the correct filename, of course!)

Building 4Pane from a tarball

You will first need to install wxWidgets, together with any other necessities e.g. g++.
Then, open a shell in the directory containing the 4Pane tarball, and extract it; cd to the resulting 4Pane subdirectory; configure, make and make install.
For example, in a shell you might do:

tar -xzf ./4Pane.tar.gz
cd 4Pane
./configure
make
su [enter root password]
make install

To extract a tar.bz2 file, use tar -xjf ./4Pane.tar.bz2. In sudo-using distros e.g. Ubuntu, omit the 'su' line and do 'sudo make install'

For technical reasons, the 'configure' in the standard 4Pane tarball will only work with wxWidgets >= 2.5.3. If you are running an old distro that comes with an earlier version, there's an alternative tarball and installation described here.

Running 4Pane

When you've successfully installed 4Pane, a shortcut should have appeared on the desktop; if so, you can run 4Pane by clicking it. Otherwise you can do so by typing '4Pane' in a terminal.