[PLUG] Victor needs help compiling emacs from source on unbuntu 6.06

[Victor Soich]

Hi all,

I wasn't sure who to write to.  Even with all the Google searches I
did, I couldn't find a specific venue.  "Someone" said compiling from
source would be fun.......

Anyways, when I type emacs --version at the command line I get:

vsoich at tiberius:/$ emacs --version
GNU Emacs 21.4.1
Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GNU Emacs comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of Emacs
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.
vsoich at tiberius:/$


so apparently, I successfully downloaded and compiled emacs from source.

When I type emacs at the command line, I get:

vsoich at tiberius:/$ emacs
emacs: Cannot open termcap database file
vsoich at tiberius:/$


I did a google search on the string "emacs: Cannot open termcap database file"
and got various results, including do:

apt-get install termcap-compat

I did that from the command line, and everything seem to go well, but
I'm now sure how to tell that.

Another suggestion I garnered from my google search was:

the fix is to install "libncurses5-dev" package. This will install
"termcap.h" at /usr/include. Emacs needs to be compiled again after
this.

I think I did this properly also.  My Synaptic Package Manager says
5.5-lubuntu3 is the Installed Version.  As far as "Emacs needs to be
compiled again", all I did was type in "make" in the directory

/home/vsoich/emacs-21.4

as in:

vsoich at tiberius:~/emacs-21.4$ make

but I'm now sure if that compiled emacs again.  Maybe it didn't
compile again because I've already run the make command before.  I'm
just not sure.

Anyway, I did all these things, and then I opened up a file called

/home/vsoich/emacs-21.4/etc/PROBLEMS

and a snippet from that file says:


If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern systems
do), this could happen if you have an old version of ncurses
installed, or if the newer version is not visible to the Emacs
configure script (i.e. it cannot be found along the usual path the
linker looks for libraries).

The solution is to install a newer version of ncurses, and make sure
the linker can find it.



I think I installed the newer version of ncurses as I indicated
earlier, but I don't know
how to make sure the linker can find it.  I'm not sure what the linker
is.  It's probably what happens when I type in ./configure, or make,
or sudo make install, but I'm just not sure.

Hopefully, I've done enough due diligence as indicated in the above
descriptions as to merit help in getting emacs compiled from source
and running on my machine.  Please help!

Sincerely,
Victor Soich