./configure problems: changing prefix?
 

Hi, I'm running openSUSE.
I said before that I've downloaded a software which enables me to sync my iPod under Linux:
I just copied it to my home directory and used
tar zxvf guipod-0.101.tar.gz
After this, I entered the directory guipod-0.101,and used
./configure
but failed and got some notes at the end, which are as follows:
checking for KDE... configure: error:
in the prefix, you've chosen, are no KDE headers installed. This will fail.
So, check this please and use another prefix!

Any ideas on what I need to do to make it work?
Thanx in advance.

You should install "kdebase-devel" or something like that

Hello, Lucazorzi.
I'm green at Linux and failed to understand "kdebase-devel".
Well, could you please give further advice?
what is it and what does it do?
Thanx.

This package contains headers and other development files needed to compile software based on the KDE base module.

It will be named that or something very similar (like -dev instead of -devel).

If I'm not wrong, OpenSUSE names development headers -devel, unlike Debian that uses the -dev suffix

Dear huangyongqiang,

The first thing I would ask is that you make sure the program which you want is not already available in your distribution's software repositories. Installing from there is a LOT easier than building from source.

The second stop is to find a pre-compiled package from a reputable source. I've heard the site rpmfind mentioned before, although I do not used an RPM-based distro, so I have not used it myself. If you can locate a binary RPM package, that will be a lot easier to install than building from source.

OK, assuming you can't find a pre-built package here are some notes on building from source:

It is common for the run-time and development versions of libraries to be separated into two packages, which must be installed individually. For common libraries which are pre-requisites for many programs, they will be installed on you system as part of the main system. However, the development package, which is needed to build software which uses that library tends not to be installed by default.

On SuSE the convention is to have the runtime package called "something", and the development package which corresponds to that called "something-devel".

One of the challenges of building programs from source code is making sure the development package for all the libraries which that program depends upon are installed. The trick is to be able to find out the package name(s). Once you know the package name(s), it should simply be a matter of using the software installation tool in YaST to install them.

Often pre-requisites like this will be mentioned in a files called INSTALL and/or README which comes with the source code, although it is not always the case.

The worst case scenario is that a library which you need is not to be found in the repositories for your distro. In this case, you will need to download the source code fot that library first and install that. If that library depends on another package which you do not have, you need to get that too, and so on. This is not very common these days, as most distros have very extensive repositories with most commonly used libraries available.

I hope that helps.