[SWLUG] Compile and Install Kooka (OCR)

[Dave Cridland [Home]]

On Fri, 2003-03-21 at 00:52, STEPHEN CONSTANTINOU wrote:
> Incensed and foolish I resumed the installation of "libqt3-devel-3.1.1-13mdk.i586.rpm" and chose to force the installation. I tried to configure kooka again with ./configure and got:

Ah... That probably won't work, no. Forced installations simply put the
files in, rather than worrying about whether they stand any chance of
working afterwards.

> Have I completely mucked it up ?

Probably not, but you may discover yourself suddenly learning rather a
lot more than you anticipated about package management systems.

I'd do an `rpm -e libqt3-devel' though, at the command line.

> Please feel free to tell me off because I am sure I have made some stupid decissions.

If anyone here *does* tell you off, merely for making stupid decisions,
then it'd be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. You should see
the stuff I've done (including accidentally deleting /usr on a live,
production, remote server, as an example of one of my worst cases... In
case anyone wonders how I could have been that stupid, the answer is
mount --bind in a temp directory and forgetting I'd done so... And yes,
service was uninterrupted, although it took me nearly two days to fix.).
I consider myself fairly experienced, too, but probably because I've
screwed up so many things and had to fix them myself afterwards. :-)

It sounds to me like you're trying to install KDE3.1 software onto a
system which doesn't have KDE3.1.

That's perfectly possible, but involves installing KDE3.1 first, either
by hand, or by getting MDK 9.1 (or whatever), which as you say includes
that version. There may be middle ground, too, involving downloading
rather a lot from the KDE or Mandrake sites, although that requires a
bit more knowledge. If you have broadband, you could even download the
whole of Mandrake 9.1, I believe.

Unfortunately, the loud splash you might have just heard was me falling
off the end of my knowledge - I've barely used Mandrake, and never used
KDE. (Tried Mandrake and hated it, and GNOME did all I wanted, so never
found a need to try KDE).

The reason, incidentally, I recommend avoiding compiling software
wherever possible is twofold:

1) It's complicated, since not only does the source know nothing about
your distribution (and possibly even your operating system), but the
reverse is also true - once a package is installed from source, it's
very difficult to change to a packaged version without a great deal of
knowledge.

2) Just because the software is open source doesn't mean you *have* to
download the source and use it, just that you *can* if you want.

Dave.