App Install help for a newbie

[decaren]

Let me just start by saying I've gracefully made the jump to Linux and very happy with it. I had several Linux machines back in the late 90's but have kept up since then. I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my Toshiba A55 laptop and everything works great. Touchpad, sound, video, and even the POS software modem. I'm having trouble installing some apps though. I'm trying to use Ardour digital audio workstation, but I can't even get past the requirements. Everything was already installed except for scons 0.96 (which I installed 0.97) and libtool. Scons installed with no problem, but libtool is killing me. I tried a few other programs and no go either. First libtool. on the ./configure is errors out with checking for C compiler output file name... configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables ??? HELP!!! with the other programs it would error out on make install. It says make: *** No rule to make target `install'. Stop. Any help you guys can provide is greatly appreciated. Thanks

[daark.child]

You need to install some development tools e.g. gcc by doing

sudo aptitude install build-essential

[decaren]

That helped out so much. Libtool is installed perfectly. Still getting the same make error on the other program. But make install worked perfectly after ./configure on Libtool. I'll keep trying the other program

[aliov]

But make install worked perfectly after ./configure on Libtool.

If you do make install after configure so you missed to compile the package and then nothing will be installed , the Libtool should be in the synaptic package manager, just installed from there , but if you insist on installing it from source type the following

./configure --prefix=/usr 
make 
make install

if make comes with some errors so there is some dependencies are missing scroll up to the first error message and se it's complaining about what . but in Ubuntu is always better to use the precompiled packages.

Regards.