I'm currently running Puppy Linux (Slackware) and came across a major problem.

I've been spending hours on the thing now just trying to get some kind of image management software to run (I can run Picasa through Wine, but half the features don't work due to Wine missing something to allow internet access - it did ask me if I wanted to install that extra package - I said yes and still nothing!).

I thought I'll try a genuine Linux image management system. So I've tried to install both Shotwell and DigiKam and I'm not getting very far with either of them. DigiKam kept asking for more and more dependencies... it seemed like a never ending stream of I need this, I need that...

I got Shotwell to install from the Pup Get program and it attempted to install all dependencies. It missed one Libgudev.

Then when I tried to run Shotwell it said I was missing Libgudev, so I got Libgudev and then Shotwell then said it couldn't find Libffi, so I got LibFFI, then it tried running and come up with loads of error messages and from what I can gather from the error messages it was possibly missing glib, so I got glib (yeah we're going into the realm of never ending dependencies AGAIN - if it needs something to run why can't it just be programmed to toddle off to somewhere and go get it??)

I then tried installing Glib and Glib complained that LibFFI was missing (strange this is the same thing that Shotwell complained about and I thought we'd fixed it), it said something about it couldn't find it in PKG_CONFIG_PATH location.

So I re-installed LibFFI, yet again can't find LibFFI - what it's been installed twice, this time though I'd kept an eye on where Make had installed it to.

Make installed it into /usr/local/lib rather than /usr/lib and funny enough all the other dependencies that I'd also been trying to install with DigiKam (and giving up 'cos they weren't installing) were also in there - so that's where they're hiding.

So why is Linux installing all these libraries into the local folder rather than the lib folder, and how do I either a. correct it so it installs them into the lib folder, or b. correct the PKG_CONFIG_PATH to look in the /usr/local/lib folder as well as the /usr/lib folder, I presume the latter is easier.

a)
Mostly, when you install packages from source, the destination directory defaults to /usr/local. I think it has something to do with the unix filesystem hierarchy conventions. For example, for software using the GNU autotools, you can change this by specifying the --prefix option to the configure script:

b)
You can modify the PKG_CONFIG_PATH to include /usr/local/lib like this:

before running configure.

That said, do you have a specific reason to use puppy? I have never used it, but from what I've heard, it seems to be a very lightweight distro, suitable for running on old computers or as a live CD. I would guess it would miss a lot of packages that are commonly installed by default in other distros, so I am not surprised that you have to solve a lot of dependancies.

I use Puppy because it works well with my laptop, have tried other distros like Mint, and Ubuntu, but they don't seem to include drivers straight out the box for my wi-fi card (a Broadcom card built into my Compaq laptop) which then causes problems for applying any updates (or even downloading the drivers for the wi-fi card).

Also it runs pretty damn fast from CD so I can keep my entire hard drive for windows (although I've got to admit the last time I actually used windows on this laptop must have been about 2 years ago now!), the laptop itself is a good few years old, it was one of the first laptops with a 64-bit AMD CPU in it - Presario v5xxx series, ATI mobile radeon, and 1Gb RAM, but it still runs fine under Puppy.