Re: gEDA-user: Final call for testers!

[sdb@xxxxxxxxxx (Stuart Brorson)]

> > I believe the old gtk-config tells the compiler which cflags to use and
> > which libraries are needed but I am afraid my current level of knowledge
> > cannot sort out this mess :-(
> 
> You could reinstall GTK+ from source, but isn't that what Stuart's CD
> was trying to do?

Just a nit-picking clarification.  I apologize for picking nits
in advance! 

My CD does try to install some of the important dependencies required
for gEDA, such as guile, wxGTK, pkg-config, and some others.  However,
it doesn't try to install GTK.  This is by design.  I figure that if
your system doesn't have GTK -- and in particular the GTK header files
-- it's too complicated for my simple Python program to install, and
your installation is broken anyway.  Therefore, I trust the user
to get a working GTK environment installed before running my CD.

Unfortunately, this seems to lead to all kind of grief, particularly
for SuSE personal, and related distributions.  The
"personal" editions of many distributions stupidly don't include
header files required to build GTK based applications.  I don't know
why SuSE did this; perhaps they thought that the freely-downloadable
"personal" distributions would only be used by grandmothers to web
surf and send e-mail to the grandkids, and that folks wanting to do
real work would buy the "professional" edition.  Or something like
that. 

Fortunately, I understand that SuSE-9.3 (now Novell) includes all the
.h files that you need for real work.  Caveat:  I haven't tested this
myself. 

Anyway, if you want to use the CD Installer, you have three choices:

1.  Make sure you use it on a "professional" or "workstation" edition
of your distribution (SuSE & Fedora both have limited "personal"
editions which should be avoided). 

2.  Pre-install the latest GTK from source on your machine.

3.  Use the installer on Debian, which seems to have all GTK header
files by default.

HTH,

Stuart