I am having a hell of a time compiling and installing any file. Everytime, i get some error needing another program or something to finish.... go figure. I'm 5 deep now and i can't install AIM! Is there some easier way to compile things, some place where i can get EVERYTHING i need to compile programs?

I'm on mandrake 10.1

I apologize, but if you really want your source package installed, you'll have to look for all the other programs and libraries the package is looking for. I recommend these steps, however (also, a little patience helps hehheh):

1. Look at a website which distribute binaries of the package you wish for your distribution. As I have never used Mandrake, I suggest looking at the Mandrake Linux website and finding their package database there. That will be the easiest method.

2. If that fails (google for a binary package for your distro too), then you have to find the stuff the package is looking for - patience is much needed here. Google for the things that the program needs - that's how I find most of my stuff. Once you find them, read their documentation well to find out what they need and how to install them. Eventually, after a little time, you should get the source to finally install - if the problem truly is because of missing stuff.

By the way, what program are you trying to compile so you can use AIM? Usually, GAIM is installed in many distributions - you can use that to access your AIM account.

yeah mdk came with kopete and it's a piece. I don;t realy need aim to much but the fact that i can't compile it i'm sure means that i won't be able to compile things down the road to right?

here's anothe example, i'm tring to compile ldDC, a direct connect client. However i can't because it need's turbovision header files. The lddc site has turbovision as an rpm. I install that, then go bac to compile ldcc, but nope! It still thinks i don't have turbovision. Error is:
checking for tv.h... notfound
===================================================
TurboVision header files required !
-----------------------------------
current search DIR for TV headers is /usr/local/include
please select directory
--with-tv-include=DIR
===================================================
configure: error: TurboVision header files required.

Even if i could tell the thing where turbovision is, hell if I know where it installed itself to.

in the case of ldDC, you need to install the turbovision development package for mandrake. The package is probably called tvision-devel or something similar. That should fix that problem. For some reason, some packages separate the includes with the actual stuff (probably because they didn't think many people would compile?). Anyways, finding and installing that rpm package should help. Similar problems might be fixable this way too.