'Dependency' Rant - sensible advise required 1

[wmg]

Almost three weeks ago, I sold my copy of Windows XP Pro, uninstalled it and installed Mandrake 9.0 as my day-to-day OS.

Since then, I've upgraded to 9.1 and continue looking for apps to do the things I need to do. It seemed like the best idea to download source, if available, and do the whole ./configure, make, make install thing - which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. When it didn't I'd try the RPM way and that would often meet with limited success as well.

After spending about an hour this morning trying to get the Zinf (

http://www.zinf.org

- have a look - it's very cool) audio player working, I'm getting to a point where I'm becoming extremely frustrated with installing things and having dependency errors etc and then finally getting [apparently] all the bits installed only to find it won't run because it's looking for a file that is either A) installed but in the wrong place or B) not installed at all.

I guess what I'm wanting to know is:

1) Is this something do to with Mandrake in particular?
2) Is this a problem that might not occur (or occur less often) with a *nix that uses different packaging methods - something like Debian or FreeBSD?
3) Should I persevere with this distro and eventually get to a point where I know how to fix something that's wrong and not get so frustrated?

Obviously, some of these questions are going to be more answered in an emotive kind of way but - if at all possible - I'd really like some nice logical advise!

Thanks and regards We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. [Robert Wilensky, 1997]

 

[ppc386]

> only to find it won't run because it's looking for a file that is either
> A) installed but in the wrong place or
> B) not installed at all.

These are (obviously) two very different problems -
does it tell you the name of the file it is looking for ?

the "ldd" command should show which shared libraries the program needs, with a comment next to anything it can't find:
[tt]
ldd /full/path/to/your/program
[/tt]

The dynamic loader searches for libraries according to
the path's specified in [tt]/etc/ld.so.conf[/tt]

If a certain library is installed, but its path is not listed, sometimes setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable will solve the problem:
[tt]
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/path/to/the/lib
[/tt]

> is this something do to with Mandrake in particular?

Probably not. It gets better, the more libraries you get installed, and the more little "tricks" you learn, problems like this gradually become less and less frequent.

Hang in there!

 

[wmg]

Wow - kewl - thanks for that ppc386! I think that ldd command will be very helpful!

does that 'export' function add that line to the ld.so.conf or just to the current environment?

Thanks again - I won't be going back to Windows that's for sure. It's more a case of finding the right *nix way forward.

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. [Robert Wilensky, 1997]

 

[ppc386]

> does that 'export' function add that line to the
> ld.so.conf or just to the current environment?

Just to the current environment.

If you want to add it permanently, you will need to edit
ld.so.conf by hand, and then run (as root):
[tt]
ldconfig
[/tt]