Hi

Having problems compiling MPlayer under Debian 3.1 (Sarge). It keeps complaining about missing png libraries:

Error: PNG support required for GUI compilation, please install libpng and libpng-dev packages.

I've done everything I can think of: added a link (libpng.so) with the library files in /usr/lib, added /usr/lib in my $PATH, done apt-get install libpng*, etc..

Apparently this is a common problem, so common that I can't_actually_find the solution anywhere when I search for it.

Can anyone out there help with this?

why not try apt-get install mplayer

It's not part of the Debian distro. The command draws a blank.

The trick you have to install libpng-dev as the error says. The dev package has necessary headers and stuff that you need for compiling, libpng is only the runtime.

Edit: I noticed you did put the '*' after libpng, I think the reason that didn't work is that apt-get uses regexps which is not quite the same as shell globbing. What you meant was libpng.*
The '*' means 0 or more of the previous character so libpng* means libpn, libpng, libpngg, libpnggg, etc...
The dot means any character. You might have to escape the '*' with a backslash to stop the shell from expanding it:

Add one of the following to your sources.list
# This is Christian Marillat's package tree. Very high-quality packages.
# Primarily audio/video related, including ffmpeg, libdvdcss, Mplayer,
# pymusique, w32codecs, RealPlayer, and Adobe Acrobat.
# For more info see: http://hpisi.nerim.net/
# or ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/index.html
# Stable:
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ stable main
# Testing:
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ etch main
# Unstable:
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sid main
deb-src ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sid main

thn use apt-get install mplayer