RedHat 8.0: compiling and installing apps
 

Well I have a problem:

I like foraging around the net for free software, compiling them from source and installing them if there are no RH 8.0 rpms available. I found this neat little applet called KFish from the KDE apps website. It's a little Wanda-like applet that sits in your panel.

I downloaded the gzipped file, untarred and compiled it. Everything worked fine, and the files were installed in /usr/local/kde/lib/kde3 (or something like that). Whoops. I forgot to change the paths in configuration, so I just copied all the .la, .so files etc. from there into the /usr/lib/ directory, where all the Red Hat applet stuff seemed to be.

Well, it didn't work, I restarted X and I still can't find the applet anywhere so I could add it to my panel. Help, have I done something really stupid?

Red Hat should be dragged through the mud for breaking KDE in this manner. My next distro will be anything BUT Red Hat. :P

When you say "it didn't work" do you mean that it did not start automatically when you restarted KDE? Can you get the applet to work at all? I would try this:

updatedb
locate KFish | more

See if you can find the app and run it from a shell. I know that sometimes my rhn-applet-gui dissapears. If I run:

rhn-applet-gui&

from a shell it pops back up. Just a thought.

There is no kfish executable anywhere to be found. When I compile and do a make install, it puts these files into /usr/local/kde/lib/kde3:

kfish_panelapplet.la
kfish_panelapplet.so.1
kfish_panelapplet.so.1.0
kfish_panelapplet.so.1.0.0

(or something like it, I am typing from memory)

I noticed that Red Hat tends to put these files in /usr/lib instead so I copied all the files there, and restarted X. I was hoping that I'd be able to see KFish as a new option when I go to Panel->Add Applet. However it doesn't appear.

What am I missing?

I'd install rpms if I could find em, but alas there aren't any available! :(