gtk+ installation problems

[David Levner <davidlevner yahoo com>]

Hi everyone,

I want to port/rewrite an old DOS application I wrote
to Linux using gtk+. I bought a Lindows machine and am
having so much trouble getting gtk+ installed properly
that I think my purchase may have been a mistake. (I
have Lindows 4.0 which is a Debian version of Linux.)

Here are some examples of the troubles I am having:

I installed gtk and glib 2.0 and various other
packages with the Debian package manager dpkg. But
none of the sample gtk+ programs compiled because the
Makefile uses pkg-config and there are no .pc files
anywhere to be found.

So I went to gtk.org and got the sources for gtk+ 2.4.
They wouldn't configure because my version of
pkg-config was too old, so I got the latest version of
it. That didn't compile. I googled for the error,
hacked the source slightly, and got it to compile.
Then I ran ./configure for glib-2.4.5, but it failed
saying that I need gettext support in my C library or
that I should use the GNU gettext library. So I
downloaded and configured the gettext library, but
make failed because a C# compiler was not found and I
need pnet. 

I fear that I am in an infinite loop, and will spend
the rest of my days downloading package after package,
each of which needs yet another package. 

I wrote this to give you a flavor of what I'm going
through. I'm not asking for help with pkg-config or
glib or gettext or pnet. I'm asking for your advice.

Would I have an easier time if I used Red Hat Linux?
If I could buy a system that would have gtk+
pre-configured, or if it was easy to set up, it would
save me a lot of time. I would like to scrap my
current system, but I don't want to get another system
with the same problems.

Thanks in advance.

David Levner


                
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