very basic question about glib

["Paul Singleton" <paul paulandjamie com>]

Hello.  As you'll soon see, I'm a newbie.  I installed Caldera eDesktop 2.4
and I think it's really cool.

Seeking to free myself from the grips of Microsoft,  I'm trying to find
Windows-equivalent tools for Linux.  The first one was an ftp app.  I found
gFTP.

gFTP uses gtk+ so I needed to install glib1.2.8 and gtk1.2.8.  Sounded easy
enough.  Seeking to learn, I avoided the rpms and went for the source.  I
downloaded everything.

I extracted each of the three archives into their own folders under
home/paul/desktop and followed instructions:
glib says to go into the directory, type './configure' then 'make' then
'make install'

that was easy enough.  But when I went to do the same for gtk, it said it
couldn't find a new enough version of glib!!! Well that made me upset, cause
I don't know my way around linux, and the instructions didn't work.

[by the way I've gotten past all this by using rpms but I'm none the wiser]

My question: how do i remove COMPLETELY an old version of glib (or anything
else for that matter) so that I know I don't have two or more versions of a
library on my system.  For instance, I found that I could use
./configure --prefix=/usr/ and glib would be installed over the top of the
old version in /usr/lib instead of usr/local/lib.  When I tried that, it
still didn't seem to work.  That lead me to my question.

If I knew where to wipe out libraries and where they are being pointed to,
etc, I would feel much more comfortable.  I'm quite capable in DOS and of
course Windows, so new venture is exciting but frustrating.

I thank you much for your help--- and patience.

-=Paul

=Paul