I'm trying to compile a program that is saying it requires autoconf 2.5 or higher for 'make' to run. Problem is, Mandrake 10 installed automake 2.13-19. I installed autoconf 2.5 from the KMenu-System-Configuration-Packaging-Install Software menu but autoconf still reports the old version. I tried to uninstall the old version using KMenu-System-Configuration-Packaging-Remove Software and it said that because of dependencies, it would also have to uninstall KDevelop and RPMBuild, two things I plan to use! I don't want to uninstall manually from the command line as I am wondering if that would mess up the rpm database for future uses of rpmdrake?

Is there a way to get both versions to co-exist or at least uninstall the old one and use the new one?

I had to upgrade my autoconf and such a few times in order to get a few programs to compile, also. This is what I found out:

Mandrake stores most the files you need to replace in /usr/bin/<filename> which links to another file name with the version in it. In my case it would be:

/usr/bin/autoconf which links to /usr/bin/autoconf-2.13 (before the upgrade) .

I did not use mandrake RPMs to upgrade mine, I went to http://www.gnu.org/directory/autoconf.html and downloaded and compiled the version I needed. This stored the new file in /usr/bin/local without the extension as part of the file name. I logged in as root, changed to /usr/bin, renamed the linking file autoconf to autoconf-bak, then moved /usr/bin/local/autoconf to the /usr/bin directory. If there are other files in the /usr/bin/local directory that were created during the autoconf compile, you will also need to move those to /usr/bin, take care to rename the files to something like *-bak just in case something goes wrong and you need to revert back.


I hope I have helped point you in the right direction.

I will want to try that. I did get the program to compile though. I remember I had archived it after compiling in RH9, then I tried to clean it here in Mandrake 10 and no go. Noticed it was a KDevelop Project so I went into KDevelop and worked on cleaning and compiling from there. It worked out ok this time. But I still have the old archive to experiment with so I'll probably try it with that just to be sure I get the newest autoconf set up ok.

Thanks for the tips.