Compilation Failure success Rate 1500%
 

I'm a recent Linux switchover, I've grown bored of Windows and Mr. Gates' antics of making me oodles for his software and hardware. So I decided to switch to Linux. My dad first brought home Suse 9.0 a lovely little distro, complete with no development packages. So for hours I spent trying to find out what "make" was and how to use it and such. I've gone through two versions of SuSE, one of RedHat(9.1) and I finally found one I'm rather content with... Mandrake 10.1.

I'm a very experienced computer user and I'm no dummy to coding and such, I'm the trial and error master because this is how I'm learning Linux, I'm incredibly sick of these compilation problems and ANY help would be appreciated. -On and off note

Now I've heard many disagreements about this distro, buggy,crashy, iffty. I find all of these to be false. However I find it impossible to compile ANYTHING. I have NEVER compiled one single thing successfully or without ONE error. I have about a million compilation problems waiting in line. My newest projects are:
-Updating to KDE 3.3.2 from 3.2
-Installing the latest Qt so that I can INSTALL KDE
-Installing gcc/cpp/G++ so that I can install Qt
- Under root, when I hold down backspace, it just deletes one character instead of continuing to delete in a series, so I want to fix that as well.

Currently i'm working on the GCC, now I've gone through much of this before, I've configured my urpmi, followed readme's and such. However I seem to be missing the neccessary files for everyday operation. I decide that Linux hates after it returns this during a comilation of gcc. I do my norm, cd on over to the directory, notice there is a configure file and ./configure it. Well it appears to have worked, hooray, that doesn't happen often. It says that it created a makefile. Fan freakin tastic. So I type "make" my favorite words because I know it will NEVER work. Here's what I get:
To me, it appears as if it has a confrontation with it's own files. This isn't the first time this kind of nonsense has happened. Let's take a look at our next excuse with Qt!
Qt decides that it hates me, in all aspects, it won't even let me KIND of configure it.

Wow. it does so appear that I don't have anything on Mandrake, including a basic g++ or c++ compiler. Any thoughts? This just starts some of the problems, if its fixed by the help I may recieve, I will continue to post more of the problems I'm having. You get the automatic genius label if you can figure these kinds of things out. (Willing to post anything else in relation to specs, usage, and other needed information)

SPECS: Compaq Presario (better then you think) AMD ATHLON XP 2.16GHZ 512 RAM

First off - You don't have g++ installed. Install it.

Secondly, it's best to install G++, GCC, etc through URPMI - they are very hard to compile from source.

Third: The biggest reason people use Mandrake is for URPMI - if you want to compile everything from source might I suggest Slackware?

Most of the big-name RPM-based distros, in an affor to make everything uniform, tweak everything until it's no longer recognisable. Slackware is, simply, stability through simplicity.

That's an excellent point, if it weren't for the fact that I HAVE it already installed. Or so says my urpmi, let me show you.
According to Mr.Urpmi I have everything the configurer wants, but maybe it's magically not there. It seems to think that I already have all this GNU,GCC,G++,GTK, and C++ stuff installed.

I definitely mind compiling, in fact I love doing it, if it would just WORK. Nothing ever seems to compile correctly. Or if I need something for the compile, I have to go compile a compiler to compile, or that compiler needs compiling. In the end I HAVE to compile something!

As well, if I use rpmdrake (the GUI one) it fails to find any packages under the names aforementioned (GCC,G++,CPP,C++).

EDIT: Upon a deep investigation of urpmi, after capitilizing gcc it appeared to have found the package it needed, QT has CONFIGURED fine, the results of make are pending...

Now that I've configured i try to run make. Here's the error :
Any ideas?

Probably don't have the x11 devel files installed, not sure of a package name for you to urpmi for but it's all the header files for apps to link against :)

GCC is typically for compiling C
G++ is for C++
Open Add/Remove software (I assume you still have KDE 3.2) and install everyhting that is in "Development"

Re: Compilation Failure success Rate 1500%
 

Your dad rules!

Anyway, I also recommend dual booting to Slackware. It's a good distro if you like compiling. Personally, I can't stand compiling, so I quit using Slackware in favor of Debian.

depending on how you configured it, you will have to have libmng-devel (and libmng ), libjpeg-devel, zlib-devel, libpng-devel, etc... due to the way Mandrake splits its packages. Also, might I suggest you look here if you need to compile something as it will tell you what is required to build certain packages and what is optional.

Thanks for all your help guys! However, I've encountered a new problem.
What DID work for this problem though.
Through a rexamination of the urpmi, there were necessary files in there that were downloaded and used to ammend the problem.
For those who wish to see the newest dilemma, my newest post is up.