Hello people, I was wondering, if there are differences in compiling software in slack as compared to say mandrake. As an example, I tried to compile the icoutilities from freshmeat on mandrake 9.2 and there was a missing dependency, libpng10. I always install most of these libraries when I do a fresh install, and I'm sure it was included or a newer version. At any rate I downloaded the rpm with the exact library needed and I still couldn't compile the program afterward. I had a hell of a time compiling and packaging xscreensaver 4.11 in mandrake 9.1, but compiled gimageview pretty easily after the requirements were met.

Could it be that mandrake installs libraries to a different location than slack?
I'm in win2k again now, but I'm considering either mdk 9.2 or preferably slack 9.1 again. I'm wondering since there are no packages for stuff like xmame on the web prebuilt, will I have the same hell with this and every other program I try to install? Does the distro really make any difference in this regard?

PS i just did the has this been asked before, and found mdk vs slack where in 2001, one user said that mdk puts things where it things they could go whereas, slack puts them where they were meant to be. Does this still hold true in 04? And how do all the mdk guru's do so well? like texstar thac and the plf crew?

Any distro can be customized enough to allow one to compile just as easily on one than on any other.. That said:
IMHO:
Mandrake is not the greatest distro to use when you are looking to compile a lot of packages. It's great for smaller packages that require compiling, and even some of the bigger, all inclusive ones. However, as a rule of thumb, Mandrake's strong points are that it doesn't require a lot of compiling to do just about anything on it.

In contrast:
Slackware is an excellent distro to compile on. It allows a lot of user interaction when compiling, and gives you much more control over what gets installed. It's basically a compiling distro. In this respect, even though it comes with the option to install an RPM manager, it is extremely unintuitive wrt installing RPMs. Even the rpm2tgz tool is not so great, simply because of the nature of an RPM versus an actual source file or a Slackware tarball ( aka a "slackpack" ).

They each have their strong points, and if compiling is the one you are looking for, then IMHO, Slackware is a bit more tuned towards that.

Cool

There is also a little third party utility for Slackware called Checkinstall which is very handy for installing from source. In essense, it takes what you compiled and turns it into a slackpack, and then installs the slackpack. This allows you to use the package management tools like removepkg if needed, which like I said, is really handy.

Thanks for the replies, I installed slack last night, and tried upgrading the kernel, source, and modules to 2.4.24, I updated lilo via the kde app, and now I have module and sound issues. Well, Im off to see what I can figure out. Thanks again.

BTW MasterC, I noticed you're running 4 different distros. Why? and which one are you using the most?

I use Gentoo and Slackware equally. I tend to, on my desktop, use Slackware more as I have customized it to fit my needs as best as I can. On my server and my laptop though, I use Gentoo a bit more, simply because I haven't really customized them (well the server is sole Gentoo...) to a point where I feel more comfortable with either.

And Why?

In the beginning, it was to see differences, assist others better (the more distro's I was running, the more easily I could give them answers specific to the distro THEY were running). Now it's because I am most comfortable with Gentoo and Slackware equally; LFS because, to me, it's almost a rite (ritual) of passage, and Mandy because it's important to remember where you came from. Remember your roots.

Cool