Sorry, one more comment about it. I very long time ago I had Red hat and had a similiar problem. I worked it out to the top of the dependencies chain. However, one package1 needed package2 and package2 needed package1. A fu@!&ing circular dependency. I didn't now what to do then. Perhaps I should of installed package1 in termianl 1 and package 2 in terminal 2 simultaneously! lol.

OK so I'm trying to install all these packages to get everything running and it's not going to badly, I've learned how to extract tarballs and gzipped tarballs aswell as getting some practice in on the shell and I'm getting my head around the whole package installation thing..

#Download package
#Extract package
#./configure (collects all the bits of source code appropriate to my system?)
#make (compiles all the bits of source code?)
#install

I tried installing GTK2 but it needed glib, tried installing glib, but it needed pkgconfig, I installed pkgconfig, I installed glib, then finally went to install GTK2, but it didn't think I had glib installed, along with with some atk thing and pango?

configure: error: Library requirements (glib-2.0 >= 2.4.0 atk >= 1.0.1 pango >= 1.4.0) not met; consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if your libraries are in a nonstandard prefix so pkg-config can find them.
[root@localhost gtk+-2.4.14]#

I suspect these packages are installed on my system (especially glib since I installed it) but my system doesn't know they're there. Something to do with PKG_CONFIG_...

What does this PKG_CONFIG thing do?

Fortunately I am learning and finding this all quite interesting. What's this "slack" that everyone keeps talking about? Slackware? How is that better than Redhat? I read somewhere that Slackware was the least user friendly distro of all, was I misinformed or have things changed?

Are my guesses about the purpose of "./configure" and "make" above correct?

Thanks for the help everyone, I expect walking a noob through all these things would be rather frustrating

man. i had that problem when i was using red hat. i then switched over to SUSE and found a way around it. but i think that slack is a pretty good OS. i had the Popcorn flavor running for a while. pretty good.