Hi,
I'm doing a Linux Systems Programming course, but I'm very new to Linux.

(I'm using Ubuntu linux, with gcc version 3.3.4)

I've got a copy of the linux-2-6-10 user mode kernel, and when I run "make menuconfig ARCH=um", I get the following errors:

HOSTLD scripts/kconfig/mconf
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lncurses
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

>>Unable to find the Ncurses libraries
>>
>> You must install ncurses-devel in order
>> to use 'make menuconfig'


I've tried "apt-get install ncurses-dev" but when I do the make menuconfig again I get the same errors.

Any suggestions...

I'm really out of my league with Linux :-) Please help.

Thanks in advance.
Donoh

Try installing libncourses.
$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5
$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

Thanks ciocanel,

I tried that, but I kept on getting the same errors errors.
I'm not sure if apt-get is supposed to download the packages from the Internet. I'm so clueless in linux that I can't even configure my modem.

So (on a windows machine) I did some heavy weight searching on google and I found a site where I could download the package libncurses5-dev_5.4-4_i386.deb. (I don't think urls are allowed to be posted - otherwise I would share it).

After a lot of messing about: editing /etc/apt/sources.list and trying all combinations of :
$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev_5.4-4_i386.deb
$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5
$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev
$ sudo aptitude install libncurses5-dev_5.4-4_i386.deb


I'm not 100% sure what sorted me out in the end, but when I ran : dpkg -i libncurses5-dev_5.4-4_i386.deb - The console began to stream with promising messages.

Then...
sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev
make menuconfig ARCH=um

Finally - the fancy make menuconfig menu displayed itself in my console. WOO HOO!!!

Hopefully this thread will help someone with package problems.