I've been attempting to install xine on ubuntu (Dapper Drake). The config appears to run properly, however, the make step yields recursive errors. I'm very new to this, so I have no idea where to go. Any suggestions are welcome.

If you're using Dapper, why on earth are you compiling Xine from source? Just install the binary version..

If you insist compiling Xine, look through configure's output for any errors; also see the errors make produces (and a possible compilation logfile), and see if you can set some flags for configure which could help.

odyssey84,
Installing new programs is very easy. There is not much that you'll need to compile from source.
First, you'll need to go here:

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/sources

And follow the instructions to update your sources.

Then use Adept (the package manager, and start by clicking "Fetch udates") or sudo apt-get install name-of-package in a terminal to install the precompiled binary.

In addition, this site is excellent for sorting out codecs, libdvdcss and the like:

http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/overview.html

HTH

Greetings Tredegar,

I attempted to use easyubuntu and yieled the following:

System sanity check: Failed!
Errors:
--------
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11 Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

EasyUbuntu is now trying to run 'dpkg --configure -a'
System sanity check: Failed!
Errors:
--------
dpkg: status database area is locked by another process

EasyUbuntu will not run before these errors are fixed. Please fix them and try again


Any ideas? Thanks for your help.

Google tells me this means that you have another dpkg frontend running, like apt-get, synaptic, aptitude or dselect.

So shut these down, and then try again.