About autotools, YellowDog, Prolog and Xpm

A few days ago, I switched to Yellow Dog for my powerbook.

I'm very satisfied with the hardware support. It's the first distro that supported my backlit keyboard from the beginning. However, it lacks a lot of software packages. Most of them can be taken from Fedora PPC (it's advised to use those of Fedora Core 5 or). However, other must be compiled.

For example, I had to compile swi-prolog, since the software I'm working on at the moment is written in Prolog. Swi Prolog itself was easy to install. I compiled it and I had it working in a few minutes. However, I was unable to compile XPCE. While I do not use the library itself, I find it useful sometimes to use gtrace or the 'graphic' help.

The problem reported was that Xpm was not found. However, I installed both libxpm and its development files. The ./configure script reported that it was not able to link against libXpm.

I first tried manually linking and it worked, so I had a look at the log. In fact it wasn't libxpm fault. The test program tried to link both libxpm and libxt, and the latter failed. Amazingly, the configure script did not check for errors in linking libxt, so the erroro reported was totally misleading.

The problem was that there was no libXt.so, but only libXt.so.6. I had to manually create the symbolic link.

Eventually, I bumped into another error (this time during 'make'). The culprit was once again Xt: it seemed that some of its 'standard' header files were missing. I found a fedora 5 devel package that fixed that and I was able to compile xpce.

Quite unfortunately, I can't use it now. Another bug in the installation of xorg conjures against me. This bug can be seen using a Tkinter canvas too. The problem is that 'names' of colors are not found (probably because rgb.txt is in the wrong place). Xpce fails and so does many stuff with Tkinter. I don't know where rgb.txt should be. I tried to put it in standard places, but up to now the server does not find it. The problem is that I have to restart the server each time (and since sometimes this hangs the whole system, I have to reboot, and Red Hat derived distros have slow boots.)