I'd like to automatically determine if my program is running on a machine that has either GTK or Motif (or both) installed on it, so I can dynamically use whatever is available. I'm pretty new to programming GUIs, so is there a standard way to test for the presence of a particular GUI system?

you can check up the on the desktop's site - it should tell you or try:

locate GTK
locate motif

For GTK, I'm supposed to use pkg-config to ask if GTK is installed, but if that's not in my PATH I'm out of luck. And there's nothing like that for Motif.

Using locate is an interesting idea, but what if that's not installed? And when I ran it on a RH9 box to look for motif, it found lots of stuff within the Java Swing, Qt, and wxWindows packages, but not Motif itself.

Am I going to have to write something that searches the usual library directories for the various libraries that implement GTK or Motif? Other projects must be doing something like this, I thought this problem had been solved already. Sorry to be a complainer, but it seems that there must be a better way.

when I run locate on Motif I get lots of stuff in:

/usr/X11R6/LessTif/Motif1.2/include/*

for GTK the only thing I got was:

/usr/share/xemacs-21.4.12/lisp/ChangeLog.GTK

actually a tonne of stuff comes up when I run locate gtk [no capitals] - one of them tells me I am running:

/etc/gtk-2.0

THerefore I know I have both installed - which makes sense as I have both Gnome and KDE installed on this system for reasons of compatibility with applications etc.

the locate command is the same as running:

find / -name "*Motif*"

except you don't have to be root.

Are you the same Mack the Hack I used to hang out with in about 90 in New York City? Part of the MCS/SMF crew?

David, aka JT

Nope, not me. You must have met some imposter. Hey! They were misappropriting my nickname! I'm calling David Boies. I'm sure he'll take on this clear case of nickname infringement! And ... uh ... I'll demand license fees from anyone who says my nickname! Yeah, that's the ticket! :-)