[Techtalk] system cant find X11/xlib.h

[Mary]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2004, ccordova at inictel.gob.pe wrote:
> I'm kind of desesperate, sinked in this trouble for the last week. I'm
> using Libranet for a few time, being an old RedHat user. Now I have an
> interesting box with Libranet 2.8 trying to install fontconfig. 

Are you installing it from a package? I would suggest installing it from
a package unless you have some compelling reason to compile it.

However, if you do need to compile it:

> With the apt-get install fontconfig command, I got a message that said
> system doesn't find xlib.h. I looked for it in the disk and find it in
> a remote directory under perl (a long path), but not under X11/. All
> programs asked for X11/xlib.h 

You probably need the xlib headers installed, these will be in a package
named xlibs-dev or similar.

Explanation of -dev packages:

When you run something that's already been compiled, you don't need the
header files defining the functions in the libraries it was compiled
against, you just need the libraries themselves. When you compile
something that uses a particular library though, you need the header
files. Since the header files tend to be large, they are packaged
separately and not normally installed by default.

-Mary