Hi everybody!

I'm currently trying to revive an old laptop of mine that suffers from having only 256 MB of ram. I chose to go with Alpine Linux since that's build upon the tiny µclibc instead of glibc. My goal is to build a desktop system with as little memory usage as possible.

The distro is all fine and well, but it doesn't offer a lot of packages, yet. It's standard desktop is xfce (which is surprisingly frugal in terms of memory in this distro!) but I'd prefer to go with LXDE. The later is however not available in form of packages.

Since I'd like to avoid having all the dev libraries on my system on the end, I put up a developement installation on which to build the binary packages for later use on a new and clean install. I figured how to create the "abuild" scripts which hold all kind of data neccessary to build the package like depends, url of the source, etc (just think of Gentoo ebuilds). After playing around with all this kind of stuff, I was able to create my first packages which obviously work.

I've read and learned a lot in this process. But in the end I ran into a problem that I just can't get a solution for. I haven't found anything helpful on the net. My problem is: To build openbox I need some dependencies fulfilled first. One of those is fontconfig and this one is giving me a headache. I'm as far as to get configure working and even building the whole thing correctly via make. But when it comes to make install which is used to build the package, something goes wrong.

The error message is:

Well, I'm not a coder and do not know much about compiling other than the common, most simple way. I've tried using parameters like "--with-libtool", "--enable-libtool" and things like that. But I was always told that these were not valid. I also tried "--disable-shared" and "--disable-static" since I read something and hoped that it would affect the libtool thing. All for no gain so far.

Right now I'm at my wits' end. I guess that issuing a command that sets the 'libtool' flag is that easy a thing that I can't find anything about it. But like I said, I'm not a programmer and I have no clue where to look next. If somebody could help me with this, it would be very much appreciated!

After some more playing with it, I was made an unexpected finding: It's neither configure nor make which needs the libtool flag. Instead it's the compiler... Adding it to CFLAGS solves the problem - only to run into another. If the flag is set, configure fails and claims that the compiler was not able to produce executables.

Since I encountered just the same thing with the LXDE component menu-cache, I'm going to mark this thread as "solved". It's not a problem with fontconfig after all and thus the topic would be missleading. Now I'm going to read some more and try to solve the new situation. If it fails, I'll open a new thread.

Thanks to all who wanted to help!