I've been toying with mandrake 9.1 a short while. I like it a lot, except my daily M$ computer use involves lots of programs I download from the net. I've had some succcess with compiling from source, but it seems I don't have all the tools I need on my deck (depending on what I want to do of course). Specifically, the lack of perl, gtk, and qt are obstacles to my progress. I've been reading posts here on the subject, seems I could have installed them at setup by selecting "individual packages". Rather than just reinstalling the whole thing, I suspect there is a simpler way to do this. Is there some way to search my mandrake cds for these tools and install them? Also, can you suggest other configuration tools I'm likely to need in the future?
Any and all that cross your mind plz, they're bound to be useful and hd space is not a big issue here. I know this is complicated material for a complete newb, but trust me to jump right into the trickiest s**t I can find. Thank you in advance for your kind indulgence.

all the packages QT, GTK, etc should / will be on the install CDs. Use Mandrake's package manager to install them (they'll be in rpm format).

Open Mandrake Control center and look under "Software management". You can select software to install from CD and it will prompt you to install any dependencies.

Better yet, go to http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/ and follow directions to set up the "Software Management" to automatically grab the needed files from the internet. You can also add the PLF source for multimedia and other applications that can't be included in Mandrake.

Moving to the Mandrake Forum

Cool

Ty M_Yates, that added lots of stuff. Seems I didn't get GTK+ though, even though I took everything they had there. I got this error when make installing: Cannot find GTK! Not building GTK FrontEnd.
So XChat is unuseable. Does anyone have a link to a gtk+ download with nice clear instructions that a newb can follow on how to compile it?

That just adds the lists of stuff you can download. Believe me, they have gtk+, and everything else. To actually get the packages, you need to go into the Mandrake Control Center->Software Management->Install software, as described above, tell it to use all packages and search.
OR, you can just open a console, become root (type "su") and then type "urpmi whatever" For instance, "urpmi libgtk+2.0_0-devel"/

what gui are you using? kde, gnome, afterstep, etc? I'd bet you have gtk 2.x installed its probably gtk 1.x that you need to install.