Well here is my problem, I have been fighting it all night and came up with one part of my problem fixed. First when I insatll a program that uses ".pc" files it installed them into /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig and pkgconfig would freek out and could not find them. So i created a symbolic link pointing to /usr/lib/pkgconfig and that seems to be going well.

Now I am also facing the same issue with programs installing libs to /usr/local/lib, insted of /usr/lib and I get make errors about a file missing. My solution for a few files has been to cp the "missing" file from /usr/local/lib/ to /usr/lib and it seems to blow over.

Is this common, also are my actions damaging to the system at all?

Thanks

./configure --prefix=/usr

HTH,
MMYoung

Check if /usr/local/lib is in your /etc/ld.so.config file. If not, add it and run the "ldconfig" program as root.

/usr/local/ is where software is supposed to go that you install yourself. Details are in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, which is available at the www.tldp.org website.

The /usr hierarchy is where a slackware .tgz package installation will go. If you install a non slackware tarball it may go under /usr/local.

You can do as MMYoung suggests when installing packages in the future. However, if you already have software installed in /usr/local, make sure the PATH variable has /usr/local/bin in it, and that the /etc/ld.so.conf has the /usr/local/lib/ entry. The only thing you would lose by using /usr/local is possibly losing this software when you do an upgrade, or go with a different distro. A distro will not touch /usr/local unless you format the partition it is on. This makes /usr/local a good candidate for its own partition. More so for a server environment.

you can add /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/ to PKG_CONFIG_PATH variable
just do :
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/lib/pkgconfig/:/opt/kde/lib/pkgconfig/:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/"