Re: flexfax: config.site and versions?

[darren@hylafax.org]

In message <36a2c8a2.17485541@mail.detel.com>, Ed Weinberg writes:
>Greetings all,
>
>It has been a long time.  1.5 years ago I configured HylaFax.  It is
>time to do it on another machine and I am trying not to repeat past
>errors.
>
>This time it is on RH 5.2 Linux

Great!

>First, I downloaded the RPM but found that it did not like various
>versions of Ghostscript and other things.   

You're exaggerating a bit here . . . there are some specific dependencies 
built into the RPM, and everything you need to fulfill them is in all of the 
official RedHat contrib/ ftp sites.

As an added convenience, I have also added all the necessary ghostscript RPMS 
to the ftp.hylafax.org site.

If you've got a minimal install of redhat you may be missing a few other key 
elements. The answer - get the RPMS from your CD or from the usual internet 
sites.

>I downloaded updated RPMs and found that they wanted a version between
>what was distributed with RH and what I had downloaded!


?????????
The RPM tells you what it needs. Why not just download those?

So you not read the list? The question has been answered here about 5 times in 
the past few weeks ;-)


>So, I guess that I need to compile it myself.

If you like.

I'd still suggest fetching the SRPM and doing an rpm --rebuild on it.

>Back to config.site...
>The last time I installed HylaFax I found that it thought that
>different executables and libraries were in the wrong place.  This
>time I am going to try to get it right instead of making 100 links.


No offence, but it sounds to me like you'd be wayyyyyyyyyy better off using an 
RPM distribution of hylafax. It does not sound like you spend much time 
building and installing source distributions of packages. That's fine, because 
it really is not that difficult to install the HylaFAX RPM once you have the 
other supporting RPMs you need . . . it just requires you to understand the 
concept of inter-RPM dependencies and know where to get the stuff you need.


>While examining that file I found that I did not have tiffio.h.  I did
>have:
>/usr/lib/libtiff.so.3.4
>/usr/lib/libtiff.so.3
>Will these do?


Not at all. Computers are not very amenable to "compromises". You're looking 
for a .h (header file) not a .so (shared object) file. These are extremely 
fundamental things which you really should understand, just a little, in order 
to attempt to compile HylaFAX from source.

I know such a question was answered here on this list recently . . . the .h 
header files belong to -devel packages most of the time. And you need devel 
packages to compile things a lot of the time, it's just a fact of life!! In 
this case you need the libtiff-devel-3.4-4 RPM. It's a simple as that.

To be blunt - you have a very lean RedHat installation there, and you do not 
really have much experience compiling stuff from source. Use the RPM . . . 
let's work on satisfying the dependencies rather than learning to compile what 
can be a very challenging package at times.


>Is this a problem?  I have 
>/usr/lib/libz.so.1
>/usr/lib/libz.so.1.1.3
>I do not have zlib.h


It's an enormous problem, yes. The solution - get it.


>Next there is general system stuff like chgrp and chmod and chown
>which are not in the /etc directory.  Should I change this in the
>file?

What? Look, use the RPM . . . puuuuuuuuuulease?

>I know a more about installing a program than I did last time, but a
>little knowledge can be dangerous!

Agreed. Get the ghostscript you need and install the RPM.

See: http://www.typhoon.dircon.co.uk/html/ghostscript.html

-Darren