[techtalk] Installing Tarballs

[Laurel Fan]

Excerpts from linuxchix: 21-Feb-100 Re: [techtalk] Installing T.. by
GJS at yahoo.com 
> The package is graphics program called Dia
> (http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/)  .The problem occurs soon
> after I enter ./configure. 

Ok, this works fine for me on a couple of systems, so the problem is
probably on your side. You can make sure by trying to compile something
else, but that'll probably give the same error.

> I just switched from Mandrake back to RedHat 6.0 and have yet to
> successfully install a tarball (but I get different problems
> with the few packages I've tried so far). Part of the problem is
> I don't understand what a "host type" is and the documentation
> says nothing about it.

It's an autoconf thing.  Quick intro to autoconf:  People want to write
software that compiles and runs on mutiple platforms, however, lots of
Unices have libraries in different places, etc that make them slightly
different.  Without autoconf, you edit the Makefiles and source files to
fit your particular system.  Autoconf takes care of this by generating
the ./configure script to do that for you.  So, to do this, the
configure script needs to figure out what kind of processor, os, and
compiler you have, ie. the host type.

The tarball includes a script config.guess, which guesses the hosttype. 
So, for example, my linux boxes hosttypes are i686-pc-linux-gnu and
i486-pc-linux-gnu.  The script should be able to guess any normal linux
system.

in the same directory that you're running configure in.
run and send the output of:

./config.guess

uname -a

gcc --version

For now, you can do as someone else (I forget who, sorry) suggested:

./configure --host=<host type>

with your host type (something like i686-pc-linux-gnu) instead of <host type>.




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