I am new to this all, and am finding out that I can't compile anything. I am able to install software from RPM's (surprise surprise - i'm a windows convert). When I try to ./configure anything - I have yet to ever get past that stage. After reading a lot online I think I am missing some qt and development libraries? (to be honest with you, I dont even know what they are)

I already urpmi'd the qt packages (i think there were 3 of them) but I still can't get past the ./configure part... Are there any common packages that I should install to be able to compile software? most recently I was trying to compile a kde theme - needless to say I wasn't able to. Luckily the apps I need (firefox, kwifimanager, qtfprot...) are all available in rpm format. Is it common for *nix beginners to just install from rpm and not try to compile?

MDColson

Mandrake can be a tricky distro on wich to compile software coz they split their packages into binary, library and devel. What you need to do is, go to http://www.zebulon.org.uk/ and follow the instructions on setting up urpmi. Once thats done, you can use urpmi from the console or just use rpmdrake to install packages. If you try and compile something and there are packages missing you can just use urpmi/rpmdrake to install the devel packages and hopefully your problems will be sorted out.

Its common to install from packages even when you can compile.

What your missing is the development packages for Qt & KDE. Try looking at the mandrake site in the powerpack section. For 10.1 the page here lists the available packages, and at the very least you'll need libqt3-devel and libkdecore4-devel, if not more.

Thanks for your help... I already have urpmi set up and I grabbed those 2 packages - for now I'm just layin' low on installing and getting comfortable! In my effort to compile before - I ended up installing a bunch of xorg packages (because before it the errors said 'cant find x something') are these installed packages bad? or are they harmless - in which case i should just leave them?

MDColson

It does depend, but usually they'll do nothing more than take up some space.