On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Martin Tee wrote:
> A couple of matters confusing me, any help much appreciated.
> 
> 1) I've downloaded Lesstif v0.82 and unzipped and tarred and I've 
>    found files like libXm.so.0.1
>    I was hoping for some .a files. What are these files and are
>    they processed in some way to make .a files?

.so.* files are shared libraries. You can link with them in pretty much
the same way as static (.a) libraries. Point the compiler at the directory
its in with -L and just use -lXm to link it in. In order to actually run a
program that is dynamically linked in this way the library needs to be
somewhere that ldconfig can find. If you've got it somewhere that isn't
checked by default (eg /usr/pkg/lib) then you need to make sure that that
directory is added to /etc/ld.so.conf and then run ldconfig.

If this is the lesstif package then you should install it by typing
pkg_install lesstif-0.82.tgz rather than gunzipping and untaring. That
will then mean that it will run ldconfig for you (though I'm not sure that
it adds /usr/pkg/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf) and also add it to your system as
a proper package. You can list packages installed with pkg_info and remove
them with pkg_delete.

> 2) What's the recommended directory structure for X. I seem to
>    have /usr/X11R6.3 but some applications assume /usr/X11. Is
>    this the default for x programming too?

I'd guess that X11R6.3 is to specifically specify X11 revision 6.3, X11R6
to just specify revision 6, X11 just to specify X11, etc. I have links
from X11->X11R6.3 and from X11R6->X11R6.3.

-- 
alex @ hayward.u-net.com; alexander.hayward @ lmh.ox.ac.uk
xelah @ ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk