What is build-essential and xorg-dev?
 

Hello guys, good afternoon. :)

I'll just create a separate topic for this. The other day I downloaded a program. Unfortunately I was not able to install it because I have to install the KDE before it will work. Some members were trying to help and advice me to install the "build-essential" and "xorg-dev".

My question is:
1. What does these two have to do with installing?

Hope to hear your answers guys.

Take care and God bless. :)

I think that build-essentials is how ubuntu likes to name a "virtual" package that will install the basic stuff needed to compile C programs (namely gcc, glibc, autotools, and probably many others). xorg-dev are the devel packages for xorg, containing probably all the headers and such stuff, that will be needed to compile programs that link against xlib or any other piece of xorg.

If people told you to install these, it usually will be because there's no binary deb package for the tool you wanted to install, so you have to compile it from source by hand, and to compile it yourself you need the compiler, libs and that stuff.

Let me take a guess, where you trying to install a nVidia or ATI Driver by chance ? so yep those packages would be needed to compile the driver module for your system.

I could not find where you were getting this advice.......Normally, you should not start new threads like this. If someone was trying to help you and said you needed "build-essential", then you should simply reply to that message and ask for clarification.

Now that this is started, please tell us what you are trying to install.

Note that "build-essential" is required if you are trying to install a program which must be compiled. Before attempting this, it's always good to check the package manager to see if it's there.

Thanks for your replies guys.

I'm trying to install Kregedit which is I already posted few days ago but it's already solved. The Kregedit program is compressed by .tar.gz. But seems the program is for KDE only not for gnome since I'm using Ubuntu. Althoug I can install the KDE but it's just a hassle.

I just want to know what's with build-essentials and xorg-dev. I mean what's inside with that softwares and why I'm gonna need it when installing tarballs files?

I already told you.

build-essentials will install the compiler and base libs, xorg-devel will install the xorg libraries. You need both to compile X based programs, I assume that the tarball you downloaded contains source code, and that's why people told you to install these two packages first. It's simple maths: if you intend to compile, you need a compiler.

However, since you still haven't directed us to wherever they told you to do so, I can only speculate which is never a good thing, and might render this thread completely invalid and senseless. You haven't directed us to the package you intend to install or compile either, so to start with we can't even know if it contains source code as we suppose or if it contains any other thing, which would mean that you don't need the build stuff at all.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/kregedit/

Actually you could run that in gnome, but you would have to have the KDE Libraries installed.. you would probably need the KDE-dev packages in order to build it from source as well..

SHENGTON:

Kregedit is intended to view native NT reg files: this leads me to assume you are running wine? If so you are capable of running registry editors other than Kregedit, like "regcrawler" which is much much better or the simplistic "regedit" by microsoft: these you can install and run by a right click at their "exe" under Wine. This method is easier than compiling from source. Jelmer Vernooij the author has dropped maintaining this software.

Installing wine for the sake of running regeditors is more practical, wine is well maintained and in fact ubuntu has taken care of its "dependencies" right in the synaptic manager.

Granting you are able to compile make install kregedit from source there is still probability you will face headache later when library dependency is wanting or pointers (links) are needed to locate a misplaced file.

Time is precious.

Hope this helps.