Installing Gaim - ...no makefile found...
 

I've been trying to install Gaim for the past couple days since ArkLinux only comes with Kopete, which keeps fucking up my contatct list and crashing every time I try to change it. I read the Install file and the Readme. I right-clicked in the "gaim-0.67" directory and chose "Start Terminal Here". I typed in "./configure". I then typed "make", and it tells me that there are no targets specified and no makefile found. I don't see what exactly I'm doing wrong, I'm not exactly a wizard in Linux but I know a decent amount of DOS so the terminal isn't too tough for me. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

your "./configure" probobly failed. If you get any errors, you cant continue to the next step.

Post what your ./configure error was.

sounds like you weren't in super user mode.

once you bring up the terminal, you will have a prompt like:

user@xxxx /yyyyyy/gaim-0.67 $

type "su" (no quotes) and then your root password.

then type ./configure and see if there are errors

Hmm, thanks for the tip Brian, I had actually thought of whether I needed to be logged in as root before and wasn't sure how to. It didn't work though, but at least I know how to login as root now :).

Anyways, here's what the terminal is telling me:

[arklinux@localhost gaim-0.67]$ su
[root@localhost gaim-0.67]# ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking for sed... /bin/sed
checking for gcc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cl... no
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
See `config.log' for more details.

Obviously, I need a C compiler. What that is, how to install it, and make it work, I do not know.

Thanks in advance again for any help.

you don't need to be root to build the executable, only to do a "make install".

I don't think I've ever seen a linux distro without gcc. What type of package management does ArkLinux Have? Is it apt-get or rpm based? Either way, you'll have to find and install a c/c++ compiler, otherwise you're kinda hosed on the whole thing.

Arklinux uses APT4RPM.

do (as root):

apt-get update
apt-get install gcc
apt-get install autoconf
apt-get install make
apt-get install automake

that should be enough. There's probobly other dev packges too.


Also, *DONT* run ./configure and make as root. Only "make install". Its a security hazard. Because if you run a script as root, and its got something malicious in it, the script has root privelages.

Thanks for all that, I can tell if fixed something, since after doing ./configure it did a lot more, but then had another error:

checking for GLIB - version >= 2.0.0... no
*** Could not run GLIB test program, checking why...
*** The test program failed to compile or link. See the file config.log for the
*** exact error that occured. This usually means GLIB is incorrectly installed.
configure: error:
*** GLib 2.0 is required to build Gaim; please make sure you have the GLib
*** development headers installed. The latest version of GLib is
*** always available at http://www.gtk.org/.

I installed GLib 2.0 with no errors, so I'm not exactly sure what's going on now :-\.