Trying to update my slightly old distro. SuSE 7.3. This is what I have been trying to do for starters:

Install GAIM
Install ZSNES (Jonesing for some Metroid 3 right now)
Install KDE3 (Using KDE2 right now)

Problem is that I have outdated libaries. Fine, no problem. Becasue SuSE's online update was acting totally wonky by being slow and disconnecting every X hours I realized that I'd have to do this the old fashioned way - through source tarballs.

KDE requires a recent version of QT so I downloaded qt 3.2.2. As per the installation instructions I ran the following commands in root...

./configure
make
make install
make clean

Ran KDE3's configure script and I got the following...The hell?

Tried the exact same thing with GTK (glibc and glibcdevel) to get GAIM working well before I IMed a few friends for help. AOL's AIM for linux is crap, annoys me to no end. Same commands, as per TFM (the fucking manual, which I did read). When I ran GAIM's configure script it said roughly the same thing about GTK. Note that I tried installing gtk 2.2.0.

In the middle of this the things were taking forever to compile so I tried installing SDL 1.2.6.1 (plus the developers library) to make ZSNES happy. Did the exact same thing as above, as instructed to in the INSTALL file. ZSNES cries that SDL isn't available when it's configure script is ran afterwards.

So what the hell am I doing wrong? Obviously TFM didn't mention something or the other, or I don't know what the hell I'm doing. (More likely the latter, FYI.) Any thoughts or ideas?

Oh, running Kernel 2.4.11, if that makes any difference.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. At this rate I'll be bald by this time next year from pulling all my hair out. :-D

Oh well, at least I got my winmodem to work in Linux.

you may have to tell configure where the new version of qt is. afaik, installing a new version of qt doesn't replace old versions of qt. i've got like 4 versions of qt sitting in /usr/lib.

i can't remember what the ./configure flag for qt is. something like

./configure --with-qt=path

try a ./configure --help

that should give you a list of available options.

Alright, compiling right now with that in mind. Should take a few hours. Any thoughts inbetween now and then are very welcome.

I specified the path in configure, compiled, wouldn't work. Tried installing Opera (which uses the same library as KDE but takes far less time to compile) and it complained that... .

But it's in /root/KDesktop/qt-x11-free-3.2.2/lib, which shows that it built but did not install. Even though I did make install. And specified the path. Anybody know what I'm doing wrong, here?