[Techtalk] Problems Compiling XFree86

[Maluvia]

Meryll Larkin wrote:
>Sorry I don't have an answer for you, but you should know that Xwindows is
>NOT easy to either install nor configure.  It is also NOT well supported:
>
>Finally, I doubt very much that Xwindows is ready for 64 bit computing,
>yet.
>
>I certainly hope someone else has a better answer for you.
>Good luck

Thanks for the encouragement Meryll.
XFree has been compiled for AMD64 - I already downloaded all the binaries that were available - but they didn't have the TinyX module available for AMD64.
I realized there might be a problem building TinyX for 64-bit, but my problem is not being able to get XFree to build at *all right* now.

Mary wrote:
>So,
>the error in question is "Makefile.proto: No such file or directory." Is
>there such a file? Is there a file with a similar name? 

No - Makefile.proto does not exist because make is trying to create it and can't find the appropriate rules to do so.
What I can't figure out is why.
I have not touched any of the configuration files in xc/config/cf  that make is (I assume) trying to use to find these rules.
I did create a custom host.def file, but am not even trying to use it at this point - just trying to get the default build to work. 

>-- I'd be
>surprised if anyone here has done exactly what you're doing now, so we
>may be groping about in the dark for a while.)

Sorry - I thought compiling X was a relatively common procedure, and that probably others here have run into errors similar to this and might have some idea what's causing it.
It is happening so early in the process, it has to be something very basic that is wrong: missing headers? missing dependencies? missing configuration info?
AFAIK, libpng is the only dependency for Xfree/Xorg and I have that, and I don't think it should matter what directory I am doing the build in.
It would be helpful if the error was more specific and could indicate exactly *what* file or info it needs.  Perhaps I need to create an AMD64.cf or AMD64.rules for it?
(Seems like the developers should have already done that. Maybe they cross-compiled their binaries?)

I am just going to download the latest development source snapshot and try again.
Perhaps there have been some bug fixes related to my problem.
If that doesn't help, I gues I'll just have to go through all the configuration files and try to figure out where it's running into problems.

Gentoo maintains a version of Kdrive that works on AMD64, but I don't have gentoo installed and don't know how portage works yet.
Can you install gentoo's portage on a non-gentoo system and use their ebuilds?
Might be an interesting experiment. ;-)

If and when I get this worked out, I'll post the solution here in case it might be useful to anyone else.

Onward and upward . . . . .