What do I have to do once I have tar-ed the gaim file? It's got a folder made on my desktop... but now what? I tried ./configure

But the make file don't work, even as the root. I am running Lycoris. What do I have to do?

when i do ./configure i get this:

Checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
Checking whether build environment is sane... configure: error: newly created file is older than distributed files!
Check your system clock

It's not fully configuring because your clock is wrong, I believe. Do what the last line of that quote instructs: check your system clock!!! you could try touching all the files you just un-tared, too.

I have no idea what that means? explain please.

Each file contains a timestamp of when it was created. "configure" was making sure that newly created files have timestamps that are after the files that the package included. This is important to the compilation of programs. Either your system clock is in the past (aka your computer think's its 2002, or the like) or the files you downloaded were incorrectly timestamped (aka they were 'created' in 2004).

The system clock is the thing that keeps track of the date and time. GAIM is refusing to fully configure itself because you don't have the date and time set correctly on your computer, most likely. To remedy this, right click on the clock in the lower right part of your screen... and then I believe you click "Adjust date and time". It will bring up a dialog allowing you to change the date and time!!! Set the date and time to the correct date and time. Then try ./configure again.

If you still get the error "newly created file is older than distributed files! check your system clock" then it's the files you downloaded, not your clock. This would be unusual... but the way to fix that is to 'touch' all the files. I'm typing this from a windows box at the moment, so I can't lookup the man page for touch, but I believe you will fix your problem by typing "touch -r *" (without the quotes) before you type ./configure . If you use this method, you may have to type "make clean" after configure, but before the bellow commands. It shouldn't hurt, in any case.

I believe from there using the tarball (I used the rpms) you then type "make" and then (as root) "make install". If you get no errors, you can then type "gaim" to launch gaim. You may need to make your own icons... I'm unsure. I believe from there you can delete the folder on your desktop.

Hopefully this helps. if "touch -r *" dosn't work (aka touch gives an error like '-r unrecognized' you can type:

touch *
touch */*
touch */*/*
touch */*/*/*

and so forth until it says something like "*/*/*/*/* : file not found". You could also look up touch in your man page ("man touch") and search for 'recursive' ("/recursive").

I am using Mandrake 9.1 and I just downloaded the i586.RPM file and just double clicked it and Mandrake did whatever it needed. Then I went to the command line and typed 'gaim' and it worked! All that stuff you mentioned wasn't necessary for me. are you sure you got the right file? Or maybe you're not using Mandrake.

he downloaded the tarball, which I believe is a source distro, and in any case is definatly not an RPM . He said "I am running Lycoris" which I'm guessing is some random linux distro...never heard of it myself. I had to download some extra rpms myself... libgtkspell I believe it was called... but didn't compile by hand.

To newbie45: you may want to try downloading the rpm instead of the tarball, but in any case you want to fix your system clock if it's wrong.

I'm unsure which package manager Lycoris uses. It's one of the first distros I tried, but I had a horrible experience with it.

It's supposed to be very windows-like, and from what I remember, it was... Sucked in every way :-p.

But if he likes it, he likes it.
I am gathering it's the first distro he's tried, too.

So you, if you have other problems with the ./configure command, post them back here. More than likely you'll need to install other libraries before it'll fully compile.

-Shade