[PLUG] Compiling Varkon (was OpenGL Libraries?)

Sat Apr 23 20:17:16 UTC 2005

On Saturday 23 April 2005 9:55 am, Kenneth G. Stephens wrote:

> Getting the prerequisites is always fun.  That's why there are rpm, apt-
> get, yum, yast, yast2, etc. The way I find what packages to load is to
> use Google on the error message.  You are not the first and certainly
> won't be the last to need this.  And, oh yes, read the documentation
> that came with the application. [RTFM].

Well, as I mentioned in the last episode, I read the documentation, but 
misunderstood it. Now that I have all the prerequisites (at least I think I 
do) I'm on to another item that, while mentioned in the documentation, 
conflicts with my admittedly rudimentary understanding of the conventions of 
permissions on directories and compiling programs. From past discussions, 
I've come to believe that one should compile programs as a normal user, and 
not as root. So, that is what I've attempted to set up, here.

The docs tell me that I'll have to have read/write access to things. I created 
a directory in /usr called varkon and set it's ownership to be rsteff:users, 
which is what a number of other directories of mine were set to during 
installation of SuSE 9.1. I guessed at this, and it appears to be what the 
developers intended. I untared the download file in /usr/varkon and that 
process created  /usr/varkon/varkon_1.18A, which the docs refer to. So, 
unless I'm missing something, I have read/write access to anything in varkon. 
Apparently, that's not enough. I ran:

make > make.out 2> err.out

Here's the error message I get (the last 5 lines of err.out, which has a lot 
of warnings but, as far as I can see, just this one error):

/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i586-suse-linux/3.3.3/../../../../i586-suse-linux/bin/ld: 
cannot open output file /bin/mbsc: Permission denied
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [/bin/mbsc] Error 1
make: *** [distr] Error 2

I'm not to sure what that first line means, the one with all the /../../../ 
stuff going on, but I think I understand that make can't create a file called 
mbsc in /bin. Is it possible that I'm supposed to give rsteff:users write 
access to /bin? Or am I way off the track?

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens
http://home.comcast.net/~rsteff/

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