Compiling from source./ New to Fedora

Roland0

Roland0

Roland0

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Hey peeps, (trying not to rant!)

I have just switched from ubuntu to Fedora as I would like to learn a more "red hatty" OS. so far so good, in fact I'm really liking it.

The one thing i have noticed is that the package manger and repos aren't a patch on debian/ubuntu.

So it looks like I'm going to be compiling from source a bit more, and thats nothing i'm afraid of in itself. BUT every time i have EVER tried to compile something there is some kind of error, either something has been depreciated or I am missing some kind of dependency, ok not to worry, I'll just check on the net ... queue trawling page upon page of forums etc NONE with the answer, or maybe some with the right answer ... but from the version of the OS from 2005.

I'm trying not to rant here but I'm getting fed up of these issues with using Linux, i really want it to work, but it just seems that unless I am some kind of computer programmer with hours of time to learn a range of OS innards I'm not going to get anywhere

Anyhow, has anybody got the Last.FM player to work on Fedora 11? When i try to compile it I get the problem "Your version of Qt seems to be too old, we require Qt 4.3 or above" however when i try and install Qt it says i have version 4.6 ?:(:(

what the heck is going on? I'm very tempted to think that Linux is some sort of vast mess of programmers nonsense.

Sorry for the rant ladies and gents I'm just annoyed and tired, hopefully i wil get to the bottom of this! thanks for listening!
 
When compiling from source you will quite often require the -dev version of packages, so while you might have QT 4.6 libraries on there you might need the QT dev files to compile the program.
 
To flesh out on barn0's post.

When your compiling from source, it will generally give you a (half) human readable error message. Usually as barn says it's the fact that you either need some missing libraries or that you need the dev version of them.

One thing I like about Fedora (though on the whole I hate it) is the search function in yum - be sure to make use of it.

So if you get an error when you try a make, and it says something about "libssl" check what packages you yum can see with "libssl" in the name

yum search libssl
 
Compiling from source without a package manager == for the lose.

* things are hard to install (no dependency checking)
* things are a pain to compile
* might break existing packages (unlikely, but possible)
* hard to uninstall (often there is an uninstall script, but it means that you have to keep the build directory handy)

Instead of going source, look towards one of the many rpm repositories out there.

I would only recommend going source if you have a decent source package manager like ports (BSD) or portage (Gentoo).
 
Hey peeps thanks for the response. I have actuallly FINALLY managed to get it working! As people said I needed a whole load of dependencies, and it was a job finding them, effectively i had to work out what was missing, and what package that belonged to, which was a pain, not only guessing the name of the package but being able to download it, RPM/YUM don't seem to hold a even candle to debs/apt/synaptic in Debian-based systems!!
 
.walls said:
Depends. They both have their pros and cons. Neither hold a candle to portage though.
Click to expand...

I've never touched gentoo/portage, although I would like to in the future. What are the advantages of YUM/RPMs? All I can see is a poorer version of apt!

I noticed when playing with arch that pacman seemed good.
 
Well... the really obvious one is that apt has no way of querying installed packages (using dpkg doesn't count: apt was designed to be a user friendly front-end for dpkg). RPM isn't so great for jumping major versions of distros (RH even used to recommend against it), but is much better than it used to be.

IMHO, pacman is probably the best binary package manager that I have used.

disclaimer: I have never used synaptic, therefore I am only commenting on apt. also, I tend to prefer apt over rpm
 
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