I'm trying to run Nicotine (nicotine.thegraveyard.org), and after a few days of hellish library upgrading, I finally got to the point where it should work (everything installed and all dependencies resolved), but it didn't!!!

When I try to run the program, I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/gchavez/shellscripts/nicotine", line 144, in ?
from pynicotine.gtkgui import frame
File "/home/gchavez/Desktop/nicotine-1.0.7/pynicotine/gtkgui/frame.py", line 9, in ?
File "/home/gchavez/Desktop/nicotine-1.0.7/pynicotine/pynicotine.py", line 11, in ?
File "/home/gchavez/Desktop/nicotine-1.0.7/pynicotine/slskproto.py", line 10, in ?
File "/home/gchavez/Desktop/nicotine-1.0.7/pynicotine/slskmessages.py", line 8, in ?
ImportError: No module named zlib

I'm not sure what to do, because I already installed zLib, and I already ran a pkg-config on it and a ldconfig, so I'm kinda stumped after a bunch of unsuccessful googling.

gchavez@chavez:~> uname -a
Linux 2.4.21

is what I'm running my SuSe 8.1 system on, with all the newest versions of gtk+, atk, glib, zlib, pango, libpng, xft, freetype, fontconfig (and) gaim.

as far as I can tell, zlib is installed correctly (though, I'm not finding much on it in my system):

gchavez@chavez:~> locate zlib | grep -v "gchavez" //this takes away the source tree hits
/lib/modules/2.4.21-231-athlon/kernel/lib/zlib_deflate
/lib/modules/2.4.21-231-athlon/kernel/lib/zlib_deflate/zlib_deflate.o
/usr/include/bzlib.h
/usr/include/linux/zlib.h
/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.1/i586-linux-thread-multi/bzlib.ph
/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.1/i586-linux-thread-multi/linux/zlib.ph
/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.1/i586-linux-thread-multi/zlib.ph
/usr/lib/python2.3/encodings/zlib_codec.py
/usr/lib/python2.3/encodings/zlib_codec.pyc
/usr/lib/python2.3/encodings/zlib_codec.pyo
/usr/lib/python2.3/lib-dynload/zlib.so
/usr/local/include/zlib.h
/usr/local/lib/python2.3/encodings/zlib_codec.py
/usr/local/lib/python2.3/encodings/zlib_codec.pyc
/usr/local/lib/python2.3/encodings/zlib_codec.pyo
/usr/local/lib/python2.3/test/test_zlib.py
/usr/local/lib/python2.3/test/test_zlib.pyc
/usr/local/lib/python2.3/test/test_zlib.pyo
/usr/local/share/man/man3/zlib.3
/usr/share/doc/packages/xanim/README.zlib
/usr/share/doc/packages/zlib
/usr/share/doc/packages/zlib/algorithm.txt
/usr/share/doc/packages/zlib/ChangeLog
/usr/share/doc/packages/zlib/README
/usr/share/doc/packages/zlib/zlib.html
/usr/X11R6/include/X11/extensions/lbxzlib.h

Basically, what I'm guessing is that nicotine has no idea where zlib is, but I don't know how to tell it where to look, or even where to point it!! The other possiblity is that zlib is NOT installed correctly (though GTK+ seemed to find it well enough), and in that case, what do I do to make it right? I've tried compiling and installing it a second time...

Thanks for all your help, this is just the strangest problem!!!