Jarrod, (pre-p.s. Following is a long email that describes in more detail what I was talking about in my last email, but is now just "interesting and hopefully useful" information, since you have already found a program that does what you need. At any rate, maybe this will come in handy in the future, for you or for someone else on the list)
I probably didn't explain it very well in my last email. It's not that the -devel RPM is actual software in the sense that it's something you run, it's mostly just header files that are needed by other programs to compile (and man pages to describe the available functions, and sometimes some software, but not something you need to run, but rather things that get used at compile time). In order to compile something, you need to make available to it the headers of all the software that it depends on, which is what the -devel RPM provides. When you compile a C program, if it depends on functions contained in another piece of software (a graphical program will depend on X libraries), it needs to be able to reference those functions at compile time to be sure that the software that is being compiled is written correctly (that function calls contain the correct number and type of parameters, for example). That's what the header files (.h) are for. They describe to the compiler all the functions in a corresponding library (that's a bit simplistic, but it'll do for now). Part of the configure script's job is to check your system and make sure that the .h files it needs are there, so that once it gets to the compile part, the compiler will be able to reference them. All the "checking for foo" lines that the configure script spits out correspond to checks for header files for the particular "foo" that it's talking about (again, simplistic, more can happen, but we'll stick with that for now). So when your configure bombed out saying it couldn't find the X libraries, it wasn't that it was telling you X wasn't installed, but rather the extra stuff needed to compile programs that depend on X weren't there. Now, this extra stuff isn't needed to actually run X, just to compile stuff for X. It is generally separated out into a different RPM so that a user who doesn't compile stuff doesn't have this extra goo filling up their hard drive. During the install of a distro, there is usually a group of packages for development. Selecting that will install the -devel RPMs (well, maybe not all of them, but some of the more important ones like X, and KDE and/or GNOME if you installed those too). If you didn't select it during the original install, it's probably not there. Well, this email got longer than I expected it to. I hope it's useful anyway. Ian On Fri, 2003-01-31 at 19:57, Jarrod Major wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hey Ian, > > This sounds like reasonable advice. It doesn't fit this particular problem > however, as it's not complaining about missing software, rather it was > looking for X libraries. > > At any rate, the kcharselect was what I was after I guess. > > Thanks. > > Jarrod >
