GlibMM - is anyone home?

Today I begin my trip into Slackware 12.0 on my workstation. It’s an older machine:

Pentium III 550MHz
ATI RADEON GPU
265MB RAM
40GB HDD

In short: Slackware 12.0 with KDE 3.5.7 runs quite smooth on this machine - having 256MB of RAM is crucial.

Installation went fine, without any hickups. I choose full install and it took about 3.7GB of the disk drive. The first problem was after reboot. I choose to start gpm at boot time, and it was messing up the terminal, so ncurses applications would malfuncion. The main problem is that all Slackware setup tools are ncurses based, and also is the Midnight Commander. Since I have a brand new monitor (22” Benq with 1680x1050 resolution), setting up the X server was a problem (if you don’t know, the great xorgsetup wizard uses ncurses too). Of course, I didn’t know it was gpm that caused the trouble, so I tried all other stuff before figuring that out. Perhaps the main problem is that I have a serial mouse plugged into COM1.

After killing the gpm and restarting, I was able to run xorgsetup and… it detected everything out-of-the-box! Excellent! The only thing I had to change is to set mouse device to /dev/ttyS0 and run startx once more. My Radeon was detected automatically and resolution set to 1680x1050 at 60Hz. Perfect! It even let me specify different keyboard layouts, so I can use them outside of KDE.

Now, onto the software. KDE runs fine, and new Fluxbox is also nice. GQView is included. Yeah!

First thing needed - Workrave. Now, here starts the show. There is no .tgz package, so I decided to build from the source. Workrave needs libsigc++ and glibmm. There is libsigc++ package on linuxpackages.net, but only for libsigc++ 2.0 (unfortunately I learned that after installing), so I downloaded the source from Gnome FTP and compiled. All fine. Then I took glibmm, downloaded the latest version (2.14.0). I ran configure —prefix=/usr and then ‘make’. One would expect that Gnome guys are up to it, but it looks like both Linus and Patrick are right regarding their Gnome vs KDE opinion. Anyway, here’s what I got:

make[5]: Entering directory `/home/milanb/Desktop/glibmm-2.14.0/glib/glibmm’
…
g++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DG_LOG_DOMAIN="glibmm" -I../../glib -I../../glib -I/usr/include/sigc++-2.0 -I/usr/lib/sigc++-2.0/include -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -pthread -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -g -O2 -Wall -Wno-long-long -MT regex.lo -MD -MP -MF .deps/regex.Tpo -c regex.cc -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/regex.o

In file included from regex.cc:4:
../../glib/glibmm/regex.h:29:25: error: glib/gregex.h: No such file or directory
../../glib/glibmm/regex.h:594: error: ‘GRegexEvalCallback’ has not been declared
…and few more pages of errors

It looks like the package isn’t able to find its own files. Don’t they the test thing at least once before releasing?

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2007-09-27