Re: How to install GTK in linux

[Michael Torrie <torriem gmail com>]

Ian Puleston wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> What am I doing wrong here? I'm trying to install the latest GTK/GLIB on a
> Linux Fedora 9 system that currently has GTK 2.12 and GLIB 2.16, which are
> the versions yum installs.
> 
> I downloaded the gtk 2.14 and glib 2.18 .tar.gz packages, unpacked them and
> ran configure, make and make install. But they install into /usr/local/lib
> and so the app still picks up the older versions from /usr/lib. I tried
> "make install prefix=/usr" but that failed with an error.
> 
> I can hack the app's makefile to add a "-I/usr/local/include/..." and that
> works to include the newer gtk/glib headers, but "-L/usr/local/lib/..." does
> not get it to pick up the correct libraries.
> 
> One thing I noticed is that this is a 64-bit system and the GTK/GLIB
> libraries are located under /usr/lib64, but the above make installed
> libraries into /usr/local/lib, not lib64. Is that correct?

As others have said, overriding system-installed libraries is a recipe
for disaster, since so many packages depend on the libraries you are
replacing.

As I see it, you have two options here.  First is to do as you have done
and put the new versions in /usr/local.  If you want to override system
libraries with your new libraries for certain apps, set the
LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to point at the /usr/local/lib
location.  then just run your binary and the linker will grab the newer
gtk libs.  Or compile your test programs against your new libraries by
setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH to /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig.

The second possibility is to get the SRPMS from Fedora 10 which
presumably are closer to the version you want, and build them on your F9
machine with rpmbuild.  This could cause compatibility issues down the
line and strange crashes but it's much safer than configure --prefix=/usr