Installation fails... Still !

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Installation fails... Still !
by Alain on Wednesday 12/Dec/2001, @01:14

I am tired of the KDE bz2 install, it always failed !

When you look at the readme file all is easy, you unzip then you do ./configure then make then make install (as root). Yes, easy, but it NEVER works !

Surely - perhaps - it is not the fault of KDE, it is Mandrake (8.1) or my install !...

NEVER on Windows I have failed an install. On Linux/KDE all the bz2 install failed, It is tiring and frustrating... And there is no easy message to help, only :

checking for libz... configure: error: not found. Check your installation and look into config.log

With such things, Linux is still an OS for hackers, not for end users...

Well, I see that the Readme file of Quanta Plus is better than others, it is said :

Should you have trouble during ./configure or the make process, try the
following:
- export KDEDIR=<path to kde installation> and export QTDIR=<path to qt2>
before running ./configure.
- run "make -f Makefile.cvs" before ./configure .

But where is my KDEDIR, how I find it ? And the QTDIR ? Why there is not an automatic search of this path ?

Now for non hackers user, it is impossible to run the non packaged KDE apps. There is something to do...

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Re: Installation fails... Still !
by Andras Mantia on Wednesday 12/Dec/2001, @02:16

You are right, installation from sources on some systems/configurations can be painful. You can try to:
- search for a binary package. For the wider spread apps, the distros usually make binary packages. I checked the SuSE site, and there is already an rpm for Quanta 2.0. Ask for your distribution maker to do a package for this.
- dig a little on the net and in the Howto-s, Readme-s and log files and try to install it. Most of the time when you succeed with installation of one KDE app from the sources, you will not have more problem with other apps (because you already "corrected" your system. Maybe you have to use the same flags for ./configure as for the first app.

In your case what you can do is:

> checking for libz... configure: error: not found. Check your installation and look into config.log

As it says, look at the end of the "config.log" file to see what's the problem. 99% it will complain about a missing header file (zlib.h). In this case you should install the libz-devel (or something similar) package. As a general rule, when compiling from sources, you need also the devel package for your libraries (KDE, Qt, libz, ImageMagick, etc.)

KDEDIR and QTDIR should be set by the distro, but if it fails, they should point to your KDE (and QT) installation. Eg. KDE is in /opt/kde and QT in /usr/lib/qt2, than set these variables to these paths.

I will try to make a better Readme, but I don't think that in one Readme file I can describe every solution why configuring (compiling, linking) fails. But I will try...

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Re: Installation fails... Still !
by Alain on Wednesday 12/Dec/2001, @13:13

> As a general rule, when compiling from sources, you need also the devel package for your libraries (KDE, Qt, libz, ImageMagick, etc.)

Thank you... I think it is the cause. I am not a developper, so I did not install the development packages in the Mandrake installation. There are many ones... Pfff... it is not obvious...

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