Trying to compile Balsa on Mandrake

Mon Oct 16 13:03:42 MST 2006

As a longtime Mandrake user (since version 5) I agree that on previous
versions, the upgrade process has been error prone and at times completely
broken. I have, however, successfully upgraded on multiple machines from 9.2to
10.1, from 10.1 to 2006 Powerpack, and from 2006 to 2007. The only issues
with the last were with the new XGL functionality in 2007 and these were
easily solved by running XFdrake.

What version Mandrake are you on? If you are trying to install a new email
client, have you looked in the PLF repositories (you can use
easyurpmi<http://mandrivausers.org/easyurpmi/>to configure your
sources if your version supports it) for balsa? I am not
familiar with balsa, but you may find it there. I also suggest you might try
Thunderbird since it is a simple matter to install using the Tarball from
Mozilla and you can use the latest version that way.

On 10/16/06, Eric Shubes <plug at shubes.net> wrote:
>
> I agree that yum is very nice. I've even done major upgrades
> (RH9->CentOS4)
> using it.
>
> Vaughn, which version of Mandrake are you using? According to
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7448, Mandrake 9.2 has it on the
> distribution disk in contrib/i586/yum-2.0.1-1mdk.noarch.rpm. See article
> for
> more details.
>
> Stick with it. Once you get yum going, I think you'll love it.
>
> Vaughn Treude wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 07:22, JD Austin wrote:
> >> Fore redhat I install both yum and apt to get out of dependency
> >> nightmares pretty painlessly.
> >> I'm not sure of the mandrake repositories out there.
> >> The dag repository for redhat stays pretty up to date
> >> :http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/
> >> Here's one set of yum repositories I found for mandrake:
> >> http://speculation.org/garrick/yum.conf
> >>
> >> JD
> >>
> >
> > JD,
> > Thanks for the feedback.  I have heard about yum, so I decided on your
> > suggestion to try it, and downloaded the latest version, yum 3.0.
> > Unfortunately, it's a bit baffling.  To begin with, the INSTALL file was
> > not encouraging:
> >
> >       For usage information, please see the README.
> >
> >       run make
> >       run make install, if you're a masochist.
> >
> >       you're better off making an rpm and installing it
> >
> > If "make install" is so bad, why do they provide it?  And how should I
> > make this rpm?  And what will making the rpm accomplish?  I haven't a
> > clue!  OK, so I tried the "make install" anyway. It _seemed_ to work.
> > Running yum gives this message:
> >
> >       There was a problem importing one of the Python modules
> >       required to run yum. The error leading to this problem was:
> >
> >          No module named yum
> >
> > That's very interesting, since yum is what I allegedly just installed.
> > Perhaps I don't have the right version of python (mine is 2.3.3) - seems
> > like the most likely explanation for this snafu but I don't see any
> > documentation in the yum source which tells me what version I need.
> >
> > In the FAQ file, I found this interesting tidbit:
> >
> >       If you are getting a message that yum itself is the missing module
> then
> > you probably  installed  it incorreclty (or installed the source rpm
> > using make/make install). If possible, find a prebuilt rpm that will
> > work for your system like one from Fedora or CentOS. Or, you can
> > download the srpm and do a
> >
> >    rpmbuild --rebuild yum*.src.rpm
> >
> > I didn't find any prebuild rpm's for my system, but I did see a source
> > RPM, which I downloaded, and I tried that rpmbuild.  It spews a lot of
> > messages, but I can't see that anything actually happened under
> > /usr/src/RPM, nor does yum work any differently than besfore.  Did the
> > previous operation actually modify the yum RPM I downloaded?  Not sure,
> > but I tried installing it, which produces a tarball in
> > /usr/src/RPM/SOURCES.  I unzipped and untarred this and now what?
> > Another make and make install?  Why not?
> >
> > Nothing's changed, though.
> >
> > My conclusion:  I've never seen a more muddled and confusing and utterly
> > useuless installation on any open source product!
> >
> > Vaughn
> >
> >
> >
> >> Vaughn Treude wrote:
> >>> Hello everyone:
> >>>
> >>> I've got a Mandrake system I use for my day-to-day business.  I do not
> >>> want to upgrade it, as it generally works fine and I've _never_ had an
> >>> upgrade-type install succeed on Linux, ever (it has always hung the
> >>> system - and I've tried it on several machines at several times.)  My
> >>> Mandrake system's most annoying feature is that its email client
> >>> (Evolution 1.4.6) is buggy and has somehow gotten worse; I've let my
> >>> mail file get large and now it no longer allows me to empty the trash
> >>> folder. I wanted to try a newer version of Evolution, but they all
> have
> >>> too many dependencies; I can't even get the configure script to
> finish.
> >>> Then I remembered someone mentioning Balsa, whose name implies "light
> >>> weight", so I thought, this should be easier.  I didn't have to add a
> >>> lot of libraries to get the configure script to run, but the stupid
> >>> thing won't compile, due to missing header files.  It started out with
> a
> >>> file that I found in one of the Debian *-dev source packages, which
> then
> >>> required another, and then another.  After downloading and installing
> at
> >>> least 20 of these packages, I finally come to a dead end: gtkhtml-dev.
> >>> It has versions only for fink, maemo, and freebsd.  There's supposedly
> a
> >>> gtkhtml-devel package in the SuSE hierarchy but those links to that
> are
> >>> broken.  Does anybody know why a package like this would be impossible
> >>> to find with Google?   Or can anybody suggest a less painful
> alternative
> >>> email client?
> >>>
> >>> Thanks,
> >>> Vaughn
> >>>
>
>
> --
> -Eric 'shubes'
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-- 
Donn
There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."
-- Dave Barry
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