I'm a little confused and I was hoping you guys could fill me in please. I'm building LMMS, and for that it says that libfftw3-dev and libfluidsynth-dev are highly recommended. Well I can get the source for both of those and build them if I wanted to, but how would I go about building a dev package? Do you pass a special argument to make or something? Is there a different source I need (looked and can't find 'em)?

linuxpackages.net does not have the packages I need, I can only find them in .deb and .rpm, and I use Slack so that's a problem for me. Somebody help please?

I should probably leave for a Slacker to answer, but does Slackware split packages into user and dev? If you install the fftw slackbuild, I think that installs all the files including the headers and other files needed for development. Those packages that are appended with -dev are for binary distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora. If you've got fftw installed, see if you have fftw3.h and fftw3l.pc installed. Those are the "-dev" files.

Thank you weibullguy!

OK well I grabbed packages for fftw3 and fluidsynth from linuxpackages.net
After installing both, I ran cmake for LMMS again and this time fluidsynth was found but not fftw3....nor was libsamplerate. Now I know samplerate.h and samplerate.pc exist but it does not detect it for some reason. I noticed that fftw3.pc was not installed, but the header file was. I tried grabbing fftw3.pc from the source and throwing it in the pkg-config directory, but that didn't work. Anyone know how I can get it to find samplerate and fftw3?

Blech. I'm giving up on trying to get LMMS built. I ran make and it gets to around 65% done and then it exits spitting out errors from libsndfile. I'm gonna have to use Windows for those sorts of things I guess.

Someone's already done the hard work for you.

The most comfortable way I've found of building software on Slackware is to use SlackBuilds. There's a repository of these SlackBuilds at http://slackbuilds.org, including one for LMMS and all its dependencies (listed on the lmms SlackBuilds.org page). Grab those, read the slackwiki.org article on what to do with them, then you're good to go.

Thanks a lot pwc101. I got the lmms, libsamplerate, and fftw slackbuilds. When I get some time (tomorrow probably) I will see how that goes. If that goes well, then all I have to worry about is my hardware not being too sluggish to run it, heh.

I generally go straight to SlackBuilds.org if I want to install a piece of software that's not already part of Slackware; 9 times out of 10, someone else has already written a script for it. If they haven't, and I have the time, I'll write one myself - they're not that hard to do.

Another useful piece of software is sbopkg (http://www.sbopkg.org). It's a front end for the SlackBuilds.org repository. This allows you to search for any build scripts from the SlackBuilds repository, queue them, and then build a load all at once, which takes some of the effort out of building lots of packages.

These two things (SlackBuilds.org and sbpkg) have significantly reduced the amount of work it takes to build extra software for Slackware.

I knew a Slacker would have the answer.

And....it works! Had to also rebuild libsndfile. Thanks man, helped a lot. I'll make sure I remember that site.