Hi,

I know the last thing you want is a newbie asking the dumbest questions ever, but I've tried *everything* i can think of and I'm still stuck. I am brand new to Unix/Linux/Red Hat (2 days and counting) and am trying to get MSN working with gaim.

First it says protocol unsupported, so i upgraded to the latest version of gaim. Now it says I need SSL so i checked the gaim website and it says I need either Mozilla NSS and NSPR or GnuTLS.

I downloaded and installed Synaptic which tells me I have both the Mozilla components, but when I run ./configure gaim tells me that they couldn't be found. I tried messing with the switches but I couldn't get it to work. I also did something to the ld.so.conf file and ran ldconfig, whatever that does.

I tried to install GnuTLS and it keeps telling me to install libgcrypt, as far as I can tell I've done this (both through an RPM package and by downloading a tar/gz but when i run GnuTLS ./configure it says it can't be found.

When I install RPM's I download them to a directory like home/chris/whatever/... and then go to that directory in a shell and type RPM -Uvh package-name-1.00.rpm. When I double click them in the file explorer thing nothing seems to happen, but this seems to work.

When I untar things I put them into home/chris/whatever/... then go to that dir in a shell and type ./configure, make check, make install, make distclean in that order.

So what am I doing wrong? Something obvious, I'm sure but I can't work it out. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Also - a few quick questions - which is better, rpm or a tar.gz thing? Where do all the 'source' files go, and what about the 'include' files? Do I need these, how can i find out where they are and do I need to specify to configure where they are?

Anything which you guys give me in a step-by-step style would be awesome... I'm trying so hard to get to grips with Linux but it just aint Microsoft!!! It's gonna take me for ever!!

Thanks,


Chris.

chris,
when u install an RPM, it has to be done from /root. that means you should copy your packages to any folder in the root directory, e.g.. /root/chris/whatever, and then from there open a terminal and type the command to install the package. that should work.

i just tried moving libgcrypt-1.1.12-5.rh9.at.i386.rpm to root/chris/rpms and typed

rpm -Uvh libgcrypt-1.1.12-5.rh9.at.i386.rpm --force

and it said 100% installed

but when i changed back to /home/chris/apps/gnutls-1.0.0 and ran ./configure it still says that its not installed... what's going on?!?!?!

thanks,

chris.

thanks for your help, i've finally managed to sort this out.

turns out the necessary files( mozilla nprs) came with mozilla-nprs-dev and not mozilla-nprs, so i installed that package and then recompiled and reinstalled.

also i think it put some of the library files somewhere non standard because i had to add some lines to the ld-conf-so file and run ldconfig before the install program would recognize it.

linux is gonna take some gettin used to but i'm gettin there.


chris.